Canadians among 11,000 laid off by Facebook parent company Meta

Canadian staff were not safe from Meta layoffs that affected 11,000 workers worldwide.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company, announced the job cuts in a letter to employees on Wednesday morning.

“I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go,” wrote Zuckerberg.

“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”

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The leader of the tech giant added that the company would be taking extra steps to be more efficient by cutting discretionary spending and extending its hiring freeze through the first quarter.

He attributes the “hard decision to let people go” to increased investment in building the company’s online presence through the augmented reality universe, Metaverse.

“Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended,” wrote Zuckerberg. “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

Unfortunately, the tens of billions of dollars poured into Metaverse have not reaped the revenues he had anticipated.

“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he wrote.

While Meta Canada declined to comment on the number of Canadians affected by the layoffs, some former employees based in Toronto broke their silence on LinkedIn.

Neil Mohan, who was the creative partnerships lead at Meta says his team was part of the 11,000 job cuts.

“I am consuming ice cream and bourbon at 7:13 am in the morning if that answers your question,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “I have no idea what’s next but it was a gift of four years I’m grateful for and thanks to so many of you for being a part of it.”

Mitchell Steiman, who had only been at Meta for about five months, says that “it was everything that I could have hoped for in a role, and more.”

Lois Wang, who was a technical recruiter for Meta, says nine out of 10 of her teammates were laid off.

“I believe that being optimistic and hopeful is the best way to get through tough times like this. I am open to work,” she wrote.

This is just one of a slew of layoffs that have happened in the tech industry recently.

Last week, Twitter employees were hit with mass layoffs all conducted over email.

Vancouver-based tech company Hootsuite also announced a second round of layoffs.

Meta’s job cuts come months after the company announced its plans to open a new engineering hub in Toronto that would bring 2,500 jobs to the city.