Meta reportedly announced its planning to lay off employees on Wednesday in the unit of its Metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division focused on creating custom silicon. Employees were informed of the layoffs in a post on Meta’s internal discussion forum Workplace on Tuesday. The post said they would be notified about their status with the company by early Wednesday morning, as per reports citing the close sources aware of the matter. According to available sources, roughly around 600 employees are laid off in this round.
Take on Lay Off
Meta has already undergone a significant reduction in its workforce. Few months back, post announcing the plans to lay off around 10,000 employees, Mark Zuckerberg had said the layoffs come as part of the company’s “year of efficiency” – a plan to cut costs as Meta struggles to monetize its ambitious virtual reality venture, the metaverse. The time had also witnessed the plans to cut off around 21,000 jobs and had implemented a hiring freeze for most new roles.
In a statement in March, Zuckerberg said the bulk of this year’s layoffs would happen in the spring, but that “in a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.”
As reports suggest, the company has struggled with an identity crisis after changing its name from Facebook to Meta. An Earnings report released on Wednesday has revealed that the Meta Platforms continues to lose a massive amount of money in its growing Facebook Reality Labs.
On a similar note, another chip development unit within Meta’s infrastructure division, primarily focusing on artificial intelligence applications, has similarly faced a set of challenges. The executive overseeing this division recently announced her departure, but Meta has appointed a replacement to carry on with the ongoing efforts.
Meta in Focus
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities and grow businesses. Meta currently makes a line of mixed reality headsets called Quest and smart glasses designed with Ray-Ban eyeglass maker EssilorLuxottica that can stream video and speak with wearers through a new artificial intelligence virtual assistant. It is developing various hardware products for the Metaverse, including virtual reality headsets, augmented reality, haptic gloves and so on.
It announced new versions of the smart glasses and its consumer-oriented Quest headset, Quest 3, at its annual Connect conference last week.
Future of Metaverse
Six months after Apple’s privacy change, Zuckerberg drove Facebook hard left, rebranded it as Meta and fostered ahead towards the metaverse, fueled by a multibillion-dollar spend on R&D and product development.
Meta’s pivot cost the social media giant over $20 billion since 2021, but the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on the grounds of this continuous layoffs, said that the firm isn’t giving up on the Metaverse anytime soon.
Reality Labs, the unit responsible for not only AR and VR but also prototypes in emerging technologies like mixed reality and brain-computer interfaces, is far and away the most ambitious and yet also costly big bet at the company.
