Facebook (now known as Meta) is reportedly pulling back on investments in a number of products and freezing hiring across a variety of divisions.
The Verge reports that Facebook is reducing its investments in a number of its products. The company is also enacting a massive hiring freeze and reducing hiring targets in a strategy that will impact “almost every team across the company.” This appears to be an extension of its earlier warning to the hardware division to “expect cutbacks.”
Due to “slower revenue growth than anticipated,” Facebook is implementing a company-wide hiring freeze and doesn’t intend to meet hiring goals set at the start of the year. According to the memo, the company’s problems are due to the Apple privacy changes, the war in Ukraine, and the “general macroeconomic environment.”
The company is reportedly no longer hiring for certain engineering roles and is implementing a pause on the hiring of recruiters and low-level data scientists. Many employees have begun to fear that layoffs are coming soon, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal all-hands meeting last week that job cuts are not being planned.
“I can’t sit here and make a permanent ongoing promise that as things shift that we won’t have to reconsider that,” Zuckerberg said. “But what I can tell you is that as of where we sit today, our expectation is not that we’re going to have to do that. And instead, basically what we’re doing is we’re dialing growth to the levels that we think are going to be manageable over time.”
Product teams impacted by the engineering freeze include Facebook Dating and gaming, Messenger Kids, the Facebook Commerce team, and the Remote Presentation team which was created during coronavirus lockdown to build video and audio features to compete with Zoom.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the pullbacks, stating: “As we alluded to in our recent earnings, we’re evaluating key priorities across the company and putting energy behind them especially as they relate to our core business and Reality Labs.”
Read more at the Verge here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com