Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event held at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbergozo | Reuters
Yuan CNBC confirmed on Tuesday that the company will lay off approximately 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing employees.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg informed employees of the decision to “remove poor performers more quickly” in a memo posted to the company’s internal workplace forum on Tuesday. Zuckerberg told employees that 2025 will be an “intense year.”
The company said in a separate message from company directors that it was “retiring approximately 5% of its lowest-performing employees.” According to the latest data, the company has more than 72,000 employees quarterly report.
Meta said employees affected by the layoffs will be notified by February 10 and receive severance packages based on the standards previously provided by the company. The layoffs are Meta’s largest since it laid off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Bloomberg first reported the layoffs, citing internal memo.
The move follows several major operational changes within Meta aimed at building a closer relationship with President-elect Donald Trump.
Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would end its third-party fact-checking program and instead adopt the “community annotation” model used on the Musk X platform, where individual users can provide more context for posts.
“The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point to prioritize speech again, so we’re going back to our roots to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. .
The following is an internal memo from Zuckerberg obtained by CNBC.
Meta is building some of the most important technologies in the world. Artificial intelligence, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media. This is going to be an intense year and I want to make sure we have the best talent on our team.
I decided to raise the bar for performance management and eliminate poor performers faster. We typically manage people who are not performing to expectations throughout the year, but now we will be making broader performance-based layoffs during this cycle with the intention of refilling those positions in 2025. We won’t lay off people who don’t meet expectations without optimism about their future performance; and for those we do lay off, we’ll offer generous severance packages based on previous layoffs.
We will provide additional guidance to managers prior to calibration. Affected persons outside the United States will be notified on February 10 or later
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