Facebook owner Meta Platforms confirmed that its previously announced worldwide job cuts of “low performers” began to take effect on Monday, a move that impacts thousands of positions.
“These are performance terminations which were already announced in mid-January,” a Meta spokesperson stated in an email to this news organization on Monday after the company previously said it would be “exiting approximately 5%” of its “lowest performers.”
At the end of 2024, Meta Platforms employed slightly more than 74,000 people around the world, according to an annual report the company posted on Jan. 30 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.. A 5% benchmark for a workforce of that size would equate to roughly 3,700 employees worldwide.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many workers might be affected in the Bay Area.
Meta Platforms has launched the job cuts at the same time it is widening its push into what it views as promising new territories in the artificial intelligence sector. The company is planning a huge investment in AI and other markets.
“We anticipate making capital expenditures of approximately $60 billion to $65 billion in 2025 to support our core business and generative AI efforts,” Meta Platforms stated in its annual report on file with the SEC.
Meta Platforms previously disclosed plans to eliminate just under 5,200 jobs in the Bay Area through multiple rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, according to WARN notices on file with the state Employment Development Department.
Those prior layoffs affected workers in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Burlingame, Sunnyvale and Fremont, the WARN letters show. The job cuts were described as permanent.