Tech giant Facebook's parent organisation Meta is expected to lay off a large number of employees this week due to economic headwinds and poor performance in the third quarter of this fiscal year. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the social media company may announce this news on Wednesday, which is likely to impact thousands of staffers. 

In June 2022, the social media behemoth had decided to cut plans to hire engineers by 30 per cent. 

In a sluggish third quarter, Meta reported a 52 per cent year-over-year (YoY) drop in its net profit taking it to $4.4 billion. The company's stock prices took a major hit following this disappointing result, falling by 25 per cent on a single day. Its market value is also down to $600 billion over the past year. 

This prompted Meta's chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg to hint at a possible slowdown in the hiring process and a rationalisation in the employee numbers. 

"In 2023, we're going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today" Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call in October. 

Meta has joined the ranks of several large organisations that are gearing up to combat the global economic downturn by relying on stringent cost-cutting measures. In the past week, after successfully taking over Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk laid off 7,500 employees.

Silicon Valley firms Stripe and Lyft also announced large-scale layoffs. As a part of realignment tech-giant, Microsoft also fired 1 per cent of its 1,80,000-strong workforce.