Meta employees were notified about the layoffs on the internal forum Workplace, according to two people familiar with the matter. It is said that Meta will publish the company’s notification of their final status early Wednesday morning local time. A Meta spokesman declined to comment.

According to public records, Meta’s FAST division has approximately 600 employees. The division has previously been working on developing custom chips to provide Meta devices with unique features and improved performance that differentiate them from other VR/AR devices.

However, Meta has been unable to produce a chip that can compete with outside products, so its devices are equipped with Qualcomm chips.

The Quest 3 released by Meta last week is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip and 8GB of built-in memory. Meta said its graphics performance is twice that of the Quest 2 and even better than the Quest Pro running the previous generation XR2+ chip.

The 128GB Quest 3 is priced at US$499.99 (currently about RMB 3655), and the 512GB version is priced at US$649.99 (currently about RMB 4751).

The company is also developing AR glasses that are more technically challenging, smaller and look more like regular glasses, as well as related smartwatches, people familiar with the matter said.

The first version of the product will be ready next year, the person said, although Meta does not initially plan to make it widely available to consumers.

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Last November, Meta announced its first round of mass layoffs, affecting more than 11,000 employees, or about 13 percent of its workforce.

In March of this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a second round of layoffs that will again affect about 10,000 employees.

The layoffs were part of the second round of layoffs announced in March. Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that the second round of layoffs would take place in three waves and would eventually be completed by the end of May. Subsequently, Meta has already laid off about 4,000 people in the technology department. This time, Meta expects to lay off 6,000 people.

Meta’s workforce expanded dramatically during the outbreak as consumer demand for digital services soared. 2020, the first year of the outbreak, saw Meta’s workforce grow by 30 percent, and then by another 23 percent in 2021.

By the time the layoffs began last November, Meta had more than 87,000 employees. After these two rounds of layoffs, the total number of Meta employees will drop to about 66,000.

It was reported on Monday that Meta’s current round of layoffs would focus on its business units, including its ad sales, marketing and partnerships teams. Today, some Meta employees have already said on LinkedIn and other platforms that they were laid off in the new round of layoffs.

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It’s the first major layoff in Meta’s 18-year history and one of the largest in the U.S. this year. It comes on the heels of thousands of layoffs at other major tech companies, including Microsoft and Elon Musk’s Twitter.

“Not only has online commerce resumed its previous trend, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition and advertising losses have led to much lower revenues than we had anticipated.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to employees, “I made a mistake, and I take responsibility for it.”

Zuckerberg emphasized the need for capital efficiency and said the company would shift resources to “high-priority growth areas” such as its artificial intelligence engine, advertising and commerce platform, and meta-universe projects.

Meta said that as part of the severance package, the company will pay 16 weeks of base salary plus an additional two weeks of salary for each year, as well as all remaining paid vacation time. In addition, employees will receive six months of medical expenses, and affected employees will be authorized on Nov. 15.

Meta also reportedly plans to cut discretionary spending and extend the hiring freeze through the first quarter. The company’s shares rose about 3% in pre-market trading, but its market capitalization has evaporated by more than two-thirds from its high.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, the layoffs hit Meta even harder than Twitter’s massive layoffs, which affected half of the company’s 7,500 employees.

In June, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox warned employees that “this is a tough time” and noted that employees must “execute perfectly in an environment of slowing growth.” Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg started taking shots at employees around the same time, saying in an internal Q&A that “there are probably a bunch of people in the company who shouldn’t be here.” Zuckerberg later imposed a hiring freeze in September and warned that the company could lay off employees in the near future.

Meta declined to comment, but Zuckerberg’s statements during the company’s earnings call last month have hinted at it. In 2023, we will focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas,” Zuckerberg said. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most others will remain flat or shrink in the year ahead. Overall, we expect to end 2023 at roughly the same size, or even slightly smaller than the organization is today.”

Despite Zuckerberg saying Facebook has more active users than ever, investors remain concerned about the company’s costly bets on the meta-universe. meta’s virtual reality unit lost $3.7 billion this past quarter and a total of $9.4 billion this year, while the company’s stock is trading at its lowest price since 2016.

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The deal comes on the heels of a nearly $500 million contract between Meta and Accenture for laborers affiliated with the latter to work in Meta’s Austin office, focusing on content review and business integrity.

Meta informed the 60 laid-off employees via video conference call that the layoffs would take effect on September 2, with payroll ending on October 3. Meta did not give specific reasons for the layoffs, other than to make it clear that they were “random” selections.

Accenture did not immediately offer other jobs to the contingent workers, but the employees were told they could reapply for new positions within the next two weeks.

At an all-staff meeting held on June 30, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned employees that the recent market downturn “may be one of the toughest challenges we’ve seen in recent years” and that they needed to pass. The recent market downturn “may be one of the toughest challenges we’ve seen in recent years,” and the need for “aggressive performance reviews” to eliminate underperformers. Judging from Zuckerberg’s words, the layoffs may not come as a surprise.

Zuckerberg said, “In fact, there are probably a lot of people in the company who shouldn’t be here.”

Zuckerberg added: “By mentioning raising expectations, setting more aggressive goals and ratcheting up the pressure a little bit, I think that might make some of you feel like this is not the right place for you. I don’t see a problem with that self-selection.”

The all-hands meeting comes as Meta has taken a hiring freeze and adopted other cost-cutting measures, largely because the company’s stock has fallen by more than half so far this year.

Just days before Meta laid off its labor force, Apple fired 100 personnel specialists responsible for hiring new employees. Apple did previously warn that the company would rein in spending and slow down hiring.

Last August, Xsolla, a payment processing company in the gaming industry, also used an algorithm to lay off 150 employees, so letting robots fire employees could be a trend of the future.

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