Meta Starts Axing Nearly 20 Percent Of Irish Workforce

Meta Platforms continues its painful restructuring, with hundreds of jobs being axed at its international headquarters in Ireland.

Reuters reported that Meta on Wednesday began carrying out the last batch of a three-part round of layoffs, according to a source familiar with the matter, as part of a plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles.

It should be remembered that these 10,000 job losses are in addition to Meta cutting about 13 percent of its employees, or roughly 11,000 jobs, that had been announced last November.

Ireland layoffs

Now Meta has reportedly announced that in addition to the 350 job layoffs in Ireland that it has already announced, the social networking giant has begun axing 490 jobs at its international headquarters in Dublin, which translates to 18 percent of its Irish workforce.

The layoffs announced on Wednesday mainly centre around those people working in finance, marketing, sales, analytics, engineering and operations.

Prior to these cuts Meta had 2,500 full-time employees in Ireland.

These latest job cuts is part of Meta’s efficiency drive after a tough 2022, where it contended with a post-pandemic slump in digital ads, coupled with heavy spending on the Metaverse that unsettled some investors.

Zuckerberg recognised this investor concern in February after Meta posted a notable decline in profits, coupled with a third straight quarter revenue decline, which led him to promise investors that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency”.

Painful time

It has been a particularly painful time recently for Meta Platforms, besides the job losses news.

Late last week Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) said Meta had not done enough to protect the data when it was transferred overseas and had violated GDPR privacy rules.

Meta was fined a record 1.2 billion euros ($1.3bn, £1bn) and has been ordered to stop transferring Facebook user data to the US.

Then this week Meta Platforms took a massive financial hit, after it sold gif search engine Giphy on orders from the United Kingdom.

Meta sold Giphy for just $53m (£46m) in cash to stock image service Shutterstock, after it had paid roughly $315m to acquire Giphy in 2020.

The $53m sale to Shutterstock means that Mark Zuckerberg’s firm has taken a more than $260m (£210m) loss on Giphy.

Last October the UK’s Competition Markets Authority (CMA) had ordered Meta to divest itself of Giphy – the first time that British regulator had blocked an acquisition by a Silicon Valley tech giant.