But the news, when it came, must have caused a sharp intake of breath nonetheless. The 490 jobs that are expected to go amount to a cut of just under 20 per cent of the current staff numbers. In total, Meta Ireland has now seen its employee numbers fall by almost 30 per cent since the job cuts began last year. The redundancies at the business account for close to a third of the 3,000 jobs estimated to have been lost to date across the tech sector.
This is all part of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” for Meta, which will see the business trim costs as it cuts its cloth to the measure of the new economic reality – one where revenue growth fell for the first time as the Meta moneymaking machine finally seemed to lose a bit of steam. Meta’s woes may have been exacerbated by its decision to move away from the core social media business. Zuckerberg has been betting big on the metaverse, investing billions in the business in a bid to gain ground in what was hoped to be the next generation of the internet. Less than two years ago, the company had promised to hire 10,000 engineers to fulfil the potential of the metaverse; as of today, Meta has instead cut 21,000 jobs, around a quarter of its workforce.