Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote speech during the annual Meta Connect event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, USA, on September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Target plans to lay off about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the worst-performing employees, CNBC confirmed on Tuesday.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed employees of the decision to “accelerate underperformers” in a memo posted on the company’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday. Zuckerberg told employees that 2025 “will be an intense year.”
The company said it was “leaving approximately 5% of our worst performers” in a separate message released by a company executive. The company has more than 72,000 employees, according to the latest data quarterly report.
Meta said employees affected by the cuts will be notified by Feb. 10 and will receive severance pay in line with what the company previously provided. The cuts represent the biggest layoffs at Meta since the company cut 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Bloomberg first reported the cuts, citing the internal memo.
The move follows several major operational changes within Meta aimed at building closer ties with the president-elect Donald Trump.
Last week Zuckerberg announced Meta would scrap its third-party fact-checking program in favor of the “Community Notes” model used on Elon Musk’s X platform, where individual users provide more context to posts.
“The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point toward re-prioritizing speech, so we’re going back to our roots and focusing on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcement.
Below is Zuckeberg’s internal memo, obtained by CNBC.
Meta works to build some of the world’s most important technologies. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media. This is going to be an intense year and I want to make sure we have the best people in our teams.
I decided to raise the bar on performance management and weed out poor performers more quickly. We typically manage people who have underperformed over a year, but we will now make more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with a view to re-filling those roles in 2025. We will not be managing anyone who has underperformed in the past period if we are optimistic about their future effect, and for those we fire, we will provide generous severance pay in line with what we gave previous cuts.
We will follow additional guidelines for managers prior to calibrations. Affected individuals will be notified on or after February 10th for those outside the US
