Zuckerberg’s virtual world is being built by fewer people, thanks to a round of layoffs.
THE NEWS for Meta’s Metaverse goes from bad to worse. Now, Mark Zuckerberg has laid-off 11,000 employees, including many working in his Reality Labs division—a cut of around 13 percent. The global pandemic led to a spike in revenue as people went shopping and looking for entertainment online. Much of that extra revenue was invested in new staff. Things temporarily went back to normal, but then sharply became worse in 2022, which has proved to be a problem. Zuckerberg has admitted over-estimating how long the pandemic boom would last, saying it wasn’t “the wisest decision he could have made”.