As part of Meta's latest round of job cuts announced in March, Meta has started laying off employees in technical roles.
Employees with technical experience, software engineering, graphics programming and other positions announced on LinkedIn on Wednesday that they had been let go by the company. A Meta spokeswoman said the cuts had started.
One employee impacted by the layoffs told CNBC Wednesday that layoffs also hit product-facing teams and that Meta plans to cut business-based roles, such as finance, legal and HR, beginning in May. The employee, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said Meta suggested that tech teams who were impacted by Wednesday's cuts may also be included in layoffs next month.
LinkedIn posts showed that multiple people who worked as gameplay programmers were also affected by the layoffs. Gameplay engineers work on virtual and augmented reality products, according to Meta's job listing.
I woke up this morning to find out that I was one of the many laid-offs from Meta today, a Facebook business program manager wrote on Linkedin.
Facebook announced its first layoffs in November, causing a drop in ad revenue and a drop in its stock price. In March, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared the year of efficiency, and pursued a plan of 10,000 additional job cuts in March, resulting in restructuring costs of between $3 billion and $5 billion.
The new round of April layoffs target technical workers, Zuckerberg said at the time. Zuckerberg said cutting the business groups would take place in late May.
Wall Street applauds the downsizing. Meta shares have surged 81% this year after losing about two-thirds of their value last year. Revenue has fallen for three straight quarters, and analysts are forecasting another quarterly sales drop when Meta reports its first-quarter earnings next week. If Meta reached the top end of the range, the company's previous guidance called for sales of between $26 billion and $28.5 billion, which means the streak of revenue drops could end if Meta reached the top end of the range.
While its core business is in an online ads slump, Meta is spending billions of dollars a quarter creating technology for the metaverse, representing a huge and risky bet on a nascent market that shattered the mainstream. Last quarter, Meta's Reality Labs unit, tasked with building the Metaverse, saw a net loss of $4.28 billion, bringing the unit's total losses for 2022 to $13.72 billion.