Image: © muhamad/Stock.adobe.com
Meta will be cutting jobs across its Irish operations, as the tech giant moves to cut roughly 10,000 jobs worldwide.
Meta Ireland is set to lose roughly 490 full-time staff – roughly 18pc of its national workforce – as part of the tech giant’s focus on efficiency.
It is understood the job losses will impact various teams within Meta Ireland, including finance, sales, marketing, analytics, operations and engineering. The total amount of job losses could change after a consultation process is complete.
Meta informed the Irish Government and affected staff about the layoffs and it is understood that the consultation process has begun.
These job losses are part of a global round of layoffs that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in March. At this time, he told employees that roughly 10,000 jobs would be cut across Meta’s operations.
This was in addition to the job cuts Meta announced last November that affected 11,000 employees – which included hundreds of layoffs in Ireland.
“Over the next couple of months, org [organisation] leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, cancelling lower priority projects and reducing our hiring rates,” Zuckerberg said in March.
Meta Ireland employed roughly 3,000 staff before the job cuts began last year. It is estimated that the company currently employs around 2,600.
The year of efficiency
In February, Zuckerberg hailed 2023 as the “year of efficiency” for Meta and said the company would focus on becoming “a stronger and more nimble organisation”.
This followed a turbulent year for the tech company, which saw some of its worst quarterly results due to macroeconomic issues. Meta’s focus on the metaverse has also been eating into its profits, costing billions each quarter.
Meta saw its first ever revenue decline last July. This drop continued for three financial quarters and only turned around last month.
As part of its cost-cutting measures, Meta recently spun out its customer services software start-up Kustomer, which it acquired last year after facing two years of EU scrutiny.
The tech giant has taken some regulatory knocks in recent weeks, and was forced to sell Giphy to Shutterstock for a fraction of the amount it paid in 2020.
Meta also received a record GDPR fine of €1.2bn this week from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, along with an order to suspend EU-US data transfers within five months.
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