Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has begun laying off employees in technical roles as part of its latest round of job cuts announced in March.
The move has impacted employees with technical backgrounds in user experience, software engineering, graphics programming, and other roles. Multiple people who worked as gameplay programmers were also affected by the layoffs.
While the layoffs started on Wednesday, the company plans to cut business-facing roles, such as finance, legal, and HR, starting in May.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously declared 2023 the “year of efficiency,” and proceeded with a plan of an additional 10,000 job cuts in March. The restructuring costs are expected to be between $3 billion and $5 billion.
Wall Street has responded positively to the downsizing, with Meta shares soaring 81% this year after losing about two-thirds of their value last year.
The company’s previous guidance called for sales of between $26 billion and $28.5 billion, which means the streak of revenue declines could end if Meta reaches the top end of the range.
While its core business is mired in an online ad slump, Meta is spending billions of dollars a quarter developing technology for the metaverse, representing a huge and risky bet on a nascent market that’s yet to crack the mainstream.
However, last quarter, Meta’s Reality Labs unit, tasked with building the metaverse, recorded a $4.28 billion operating loss, bringing the unit’s total losses for 2022 to $13.72 billion.
Overall, the layoffs in technical roles are part of Meta’s ongoing restructuring to focus more on developing technology for the metaverse, while also cutting costs in other areas of the business.
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