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”.
Meanwhile, at Twitter, Elon Musk fired around 3,700 people, or half the workforce, including many contractors monitoring the platform’s content. Amazon has also recently announced plans to lay 10,000 people off, although it has over 1.5 million employees worldwide, about a fifth of which are corporate roles. Other companies to shed staff include Cisco, which lost 4,300, Stripe (1,100 or 14 percent of its workforce), Shopify (1,000, 10 percent), Coinbase (1,100, 18 percent), ToGo (1,300), and even Microsoft (1,000).
According to TrueUp’s online tech layoff tracker, there have been 202,522 internetbased tech jobs lost worldwide up to mid-November 2022. So what’s happening at these big tech companies? The tech industry isn’t alone in suffering the effects of a global economic downturn, of course, but laying off staff is an option it often uses to cut costs. Before we get too pessimistic, the unemployment rate for tech workers is just 2.2 percent (below the national average), and it’s an industry that finds it easy to employ people in better times.