Meta lays off tech teams, battering employee morale

Meta Platforms Inc on Wednesday carried out another round of job cuts, this time hitting engineers and adjacent tech teams, as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg further moved to streamline the business in a bid to make 2023 a "year of efficiency."

Meta in March became the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs, which it said would take place in three main batches over several months and impact 10,000 employees.

Wednesday's cuts, though expected, prompted expressions of frustration from Meta employees. Layoffs were the subject of the most popular questions posted on an internal company forum on Wednesday ahead of an upcoming employee town hall.

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"You've shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?" read one question seen by Reuters.

The question references comments Zuckerberg made last year urging employees to work with more "intensity" to meet the Facebook and Instagram parent company's business challenges.

The company declined a Reuters request for comment.

Meta's first round of layoffs in the fall hit more than 11,000 employees, or 13 per cent of its workforce at the time, and preceded other major tech companies shedding thousands of employees after a pandemic-led boom in digital advertising and cloud computing.

With the restructuring, Meta is also shelving lower-priority projects and "flattening" layers of middle management.

Investors have rewarded the company for downsizing.

Meta shares have surged about 80 per cent this year, more than erasing a 64 per cent drop in 2022, and outperforming the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite's 16 per cent rise in the period.

The company, which will announce its first-quarter results on April 26, is expected to benefit from a modest pickup in the digital advertising market and regulatory pressure on chief rival TikTok.