On Twitter, which officially became Elon Musk’s company on October 28th a big layoff has happened. While thousands of Twitter employees suddenly lost their jobs, similar news came today from another giant platform.

Parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Meta Platforms Inc., It laid off more than 11,000 employees. The announcement was made directly by the company’s CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation:

“Today, I’m sharing some of the toughest changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by approximately 13% and let go of more than 11,000 of our talented employees. We’ve also decided to make it leaner and cleaner by reducing on-demand spend and extending our onboarding time into Q1. We’re taking some extra steps to become an efficient business.

I want to report on these decisions and how we got here. I know this is difficult for everyone and I am especially sorry for those affected.”

Zuckerberg, in his lengthy statement he shared, addressed the laid-off workers. Basic salary for 16 weeksstated that it will provide the employee and his family with three months of career support and six months of health insurance. Zuckerberg stated that the support for workers outside the US will be shared later.

Workers were told not to travel:

According to details shared by the Wall Street Journal, the company has told its employees not to take “unnecessary” trips this week in preparation for layoffs.

So why Meta fired 11,000 employees: Zuckerberg admitted his mistake:

“With the onset of COVID, the world quickly went online and the rise of e-commerce led to massive revenue growth. Many people predicted that this would be a lasting acceleration that will continue beyond the pandemic. So I did and increased our investments Significantly Unfortunately, this didn’t happen as I expected Online trading not only reverted to previous trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition and loss of advertising signal also resulted in our earnings being much lower than I expected. I misunderstood this and take my responsibility for it.

In this new environment, we need to use capital more efficiently. We’ve moved more of our resources to fewer high-priority growth areas, such as our AI detection engine, our advertising and business platforms, and our long-term vision for metadata. We have reduced costs in our business, including shrinking budgets, reducing benefits and reducing our real estate footprint. We are restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone will not align our spending with our income growth, so I made the difficult decision to let people go.”

So what could be the other reasons?

Another undisclosed reason for the layoffs may be that the company has yet to recoup its investment in the metaverse. Meta has invested $15 billion in the project alone since the beginning of 2021, but has not been successful in contemporary ventures such as Horizon Worlds. Of course the market value of the company lost its life during this process, Stocks lost 70% of their value.

While all these projects and loss of money continue, the company continues More than 15 thousand new employees in the first 9 months of this year alone he rented. In 2020 and 2021 this was a total of 27 thousand. Meta’s loss of money, user dissatisfaction and project failure also led to shareholder complaints.

We saw the biggest example of this last month. In an open letter to Zuckerberg, investment firm Altimeter Capital advised him to cut its workforce and give up his passion for the metaverse. While the second advice doesn’t seem to have much impact, the first advice seems to have worked.

Zuckerberg said he will explain in the coming weeks what the company’s direction will be after the layoffs.