The hundreds of new layoffs come after Meta cut about 1,500 employees in January, mostly from Reality Labs, which makes the Quest VR headset and the Horizon Worlds platform. In total, META employs approximately 78,000 people.
“Teams at Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they are best positioned to achieve their goals,” a spokesperson for Meta told Gizmodo in a statement on Wednesday. “Where possible, we are exploring other opportunities for employees whose position may be affected.”
Facebook was renamed Meta in 2021 because CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought the metaverse was the future. But it turns out that requiring you to strap a giant computer to your face is quite a big barrier to mass adoption. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, while a different product and use case, have sold much better, probably because they look more like normal glasses on your face.
Reality Labs has lost approximately $73 billion since Zuck shifted his company’s focus to the metaverse. Last week the meta announced it was shutting down Horizon Worlds and returned just days later.
“We’ve decided, actually, that we’re going to keep working on Horizon Worlds in VR for existing games,” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said in an Instagram AMA last week.
Meta is trying to take a big step forward in AI, with a recent Wall Street Journal report suggesting that Zuckerberg is even creating a personal AI agent that will work alongside Meta workers.
Meta suffered two legal defeats in the past two days, the first in New Mexico where the state attorney general filed a lawsuit alleging it misled consumers about the safety of its products and potential harm to children. Metra has been ordered to pay about $375 million in civil penalties in that case, much less than the $2 billion sought by the state.
The second defeat in court came on Wednesday when Meta and Google both lost a case brought by a woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child and suffered mental health problems as a result. Meta argued that the woman’s mental illnesses occurred before her exposure to Instagram. The jury awarded the woman $3 million in that case.
Both cases were closely watched because there are about 2,000 other cases pending against Meta in federal court over child safety and social media addiction issues.
It’s entirely possible that more layoffs at Meta are in the near future. Reuters reported last week that Meta would lay off 20% or more of its workforce. That would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 people. According to Reuters, the reason for the layoffs was an effort to offset “expensive artificial intelligence infrastructure stakes” and “prepare” for “greater efficiency” that should be realized by AI advancements.
Meta told Gizmodo over email on Wednesday. The Reuters report was “hypothetical” and contained a “theoretical viewpoint”.
<a href