Meta to lay off 10,000 more workers after initial cuts in November
Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on “An Examination of Facebook and Its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors” in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on October 23, 2019.
MANDEL NGAN | AFP | Getty Images
Meta will lay off 10,000 more workers and incur restructuring costs ranging from three to five billion dollars, the company announced Tuesday, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg warning that economic instability could continue for “many years.”
Shares of Meta were up about 5.5%.
“Here’s the timeline you should expect: over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates,” Zuckerberg said in a message to employees, which was also posted to Meta’s blog.
He added that the company plans to close 5,000 additional open roles that it hasn’t yet filled. In a nod to continued economic uncertainty, Zuckerberg noted that the company should prepare for “the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”
In a SEC filing announcing the cuts, the company also said it anticipated lowered total expenses in 2023, ranging from $86 to $92 billion.
The new round of layoffs follow a previous round of cuts, announced in November, that affected over 11,000 workers, which equated to roughly 13% of Meta’s overall staff.
Zuckerberg has pitched 2023 as the company’s “year of efficiency,” in which the firm aims to become “a stronger and more nimble organization.”
“We are a technology company, and our ultimate output is what we build for people,” Zuckerberg said. As part of the restructuring, the company will also increase the number of direct reports each manager has.
Zuckerberg told analysts in February that the Meta plans “on cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be crucial” while simultaneously “removing layers of middle management to make decisions faster.”
“A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster,” Zuckerberg’s message said.
Still, Meta continues to spend billions of dollars developing the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies required to build the digital universe coined the metaverse. The company’s Reality Labs division that’s tasked with creating the metaverse lost about $13.7 billion in 2022 on $2.16 billion of revenue.
Amazon announced a new round of layoffs in January, impacting 18,000 employees across multiple divisions.
Twilio, Dell, Zoom and eBay also recently disclosed significant cuts to their workforce. In January, Google revealed plans to lay off more than 12,000 workers, Microsoft announced plans to cut 10,000 employees and Salesforce said it planned to cut 7,000 jobs.
CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
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AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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