Four months after laying off 13% of its workforce, Meta Platforms Inc. today announced plans to let go 10,000 more employees and scrap 5,000 job postings.

The layoffs will be carried out in phases. In the first phase, which will begin later this week, Meta plans make job cuts at its recruiting organization. Workforce reductions at the company’s technology and business groups will follow in late April and late May, respectively. 

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that. It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a memo to staffers. “They’ve dedicated themselves to our mission and I’m personally grateful for all their efforts. We will support people in the same ways we have before and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve.”

Meta disclosed in a regulatory filing that it expects to take a charge of $3 billion to $5 billion as a result of the layoffs and office consolidation initiatives. Including the charge, Meta expects its total expenditures in 2023 will range between $86 billion and $92 billion. That’s down from the $94 billion to $100 billion range it provided in November, which was itself $1 billion lower on the high end than the company’s original estimate. 

The layoffs are part of a broader effort by Meta to make its business operations more efficient amid slowing ad sales. The company posted revenue of $32.17 billion last quarter, which represents a year-over-year decline of 4%. However, it topped the consensus analyst estimate. 

As part of its effort to increase operational efficiency, the company plans to cancel a number of “lower-priority projects.” Additionally, it will seek to flatten its organizational structure in a bid to improve productivity. 

“We will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management,” Zuckerberg wrote in today’s memo. “As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors.”

After Meta completes the restructuring initiative, it plans to lift the freeze currently in place on hiring and employee transfers between business units. In parallel, the company will make enhancements to its developer tooling and organizational processes with the goal of improving engineers’ productivity.

Last November, Meta disclosed that it was also reviewing data center infrastructure spending as part of its cost-cutting effort. “As we build our AI infrastructure, we’re focused on becoming even more efficient with our capacity,” Zuckerberg stated at the time. However, he emphasized today that machine learning continues to be a priority for the company along with the metaverse.

“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing. Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”

Image: Meta