On Wednesday, 9 November 2022, Mark Zuckerberg told Meta's employees that 11,000 of them, about 13 per cent, were being let go, the first mass layoff in the company's 18-year history. "I got this wrong, and I take responsibility," he wrote, of a bet that the pandemic surge in online activity would last. Five days later the hardware cuts followed: Meta will stop making the Portal, its video-calling screen, and has cancelled the two smartwatches it had been developing for a 2023 launch, according to reports on 14 November.
What goes
- Portal. Launched in 2018 as a home video-calling device for Messenger and WhatsApp, it never found a mass market; a June decision to retire the consumer version and pivot it to businesses has now become a full wind-down.
- Two smartwatches. Codenamed projects with detachable cameras and video calling, planned for next year, cancelled outright.
What stays
The Quest 2 and the new $1,500 Quest Pro headset, and the augmented-reality glasses in development. Zuckerberg has said the company will keep spending on Reality Labs, the division building the "metaverse", which lost $9.4 billion in the first nine months of 2022 and is expected to lose more next year. The cuts, in other words, fall on everything except the thing investors most wanted cut.
Why now
Three forces converged. Apple's 2021 privacy change on the iPhone made it harder for Facebook and Instagram to target ads, costing an estimated $10 billion a year. TikTok took the attention of the under-25s. And the post-pandemic return to normal life, plus inflation, cut advertising budgets everywhere. Meta's revenue fell for two consecutive quarters, its share price lost about 70 per cent in a year, and a company that had hired 27,000 people in two years reversed course. It is not alone: Twitter fired half its staff on 4 November, and Amazon is reported to be cutting about 10,000.
What it means here
Nothing changes on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp in Bangladesh; those are the profitable products the cuts are meant to protect. The layoffs do touch the country in two ways. Bangladeshi engineers at Meta's US, London and Singapore offices were among those affected, and the freeze on hiring closes, for now, one of the most sought-after destinations for graduates of BUET and the country's programming contests. And Meta's regional teams that handle government requests, election integrity and Bangla-language moderation are part of the same 13 per cent; how thin they become is a question the next election year will answer.
