Facebook Announces Hiring Freeze, Warns Of “Team Restructuring”, Stocks Slumps

As advertising revenue growth stalls, Meta Platforms Inc., the owner of Facebook and Instagram, told employees that it plans to implement a hiring freeze and restructure employee teams in the latest effort to trim costs, reported Bloomberg. 

A person in attendance during a company Q&A session said CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the hiring freeze as this is the latest evidence advertising revenue growth for the social media giant is slowing. There’s also the concern about waning activity among users. 

“For the first 18 years of the company, we basically grew quickly basically every year, and then more recently our revenue has been flat to slightly down for the first time,” Zuckerberg told staff Thursday.

“I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we’re seeing it doesn’t yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively,” he added.

Last week, Meta began quietly cutting staff by reorganizing departments while giving ‘reorganized’ employees the ability to apply for other roles within the company, according to WSJ. 

The goal of reshuffling employees is to thwart the mass issuance of pink slips. 

Zuckerberg sounded the alarm in July that Meta would “steadily reduce headcount growth … and many teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas.”

Bloomberg noted Meta’s internal priorities include Reels, focusing on its competitor: TikTok, and Zuckerberg’s futuristic metaverse. 

Meta shares are down more than 4% near session lows.

The company reported having 83,553 employees at the end of Q2, up 32% from a year earlier. 

… “realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said at a company town hall in June.