Meta is expected to begin a round of mass layoffs this week that will affect thousands of staffers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited sources familiar with the matter. A planned announcement may be made as soon as Wednesday, the newspaper reported. Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, employed more than 87,000 people at the end of September. The 18-year-old company has already told employees to cancel non-essential travel from this week onward, sources told the Journal. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment to the newspaper, pointing instead to Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks last month on the a third-quarter earnings call, with the founder and chief executive noting plans to “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.” He continued: “That means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
