Large scale layoffs coming at Facebook's parent company Meta: report
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New York (PTI): After job cuts at Twitter, Facebook's parent company Meta is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week in what could be the largest reduction to date at a "major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment," a media report said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the layoffs at Meta, which has more than 87,000 employees, are expected to affect "many thousands of employees" and could come as soon as Wednesday.
The WSJ report said that company officials have told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week.
The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company's 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts at Twitter Inc. this past week, which hit about half of that company's staff, the number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment," it said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the company would focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas.
So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year, Zuckerberg had said on the company's third-quarter earnings call last month. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.
Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here, Zuckerberg had told employees at a companywide meeting at the end of June.
The layoffs at Meta come just days after Twitter's new owner Elon Musk cut the company's workforce by half following his acquisition of the social media site.
The WSJ reported that Meta had gone on a hiring spree during the pandemic as life and business shifted more online. Meta added more than 27,000 employees in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 combined and added a further 15,344 in the first nine months of this year about one-fourth of that during the most recent quarter.
Meta, whose stock has fallen more than 70 per cent this year, has highlighted deteriorating macroeconomic trends, but investors have also been spooked by its spending and threats to the company's core social-media business.
Growth for that business in many markets has stalled amid stiff competition from TikTok, and Apple Inc.'s requirement that users opt into the tracking of their devices has curtailed the ability of social media platforms to target ads, it said.
The report added that much of Meta's ballooning costs stem from Zuckerberg's commitment to Reality Labs, which is a division of the company responsible for virtual- and augmented-reality headsets as well as the creation of the metaverse. Zuckerberg has billed the "metaverse as a constellation of interlocking virtual worlds in which people will eventually work, play, live and shop, the WSJ reported.
The effort has cost the company USD 15 billion since the beginning of last year. But despite investing heavily in promoting its virtual-reality platform, Horizon Worlds, users have been largely unimpressed, it said.
I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment, Zuckerberg had told analysts on the company's earnings call last month. I think people are going to look back on decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here.
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Israel launches first airstrike on Lebanon since ceasefire, accusing Hezbollah of breaching truce
Beirut, Nov 28: The Israeli military on Thursday said its warplanes fired on southern Lebanon after detecting Hezbollah activity at a rocket storage facility, the first Israeli airstrike a day after a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took hold.
There was no immediate word on casualties from Israel's aerial attack, which came hours after the Israeli military said it fired on people trying to return to certain areas in southern Lebanon. Israel said they were violating the ceasefire agreement, without providing details. Lebanon's state-run National News Agency said two people were wounded.
The back-to-back incidents stirred unease about the agreement, brokered by the United States and France, which includes an initial two-month ceasefire in which Hezbollah members are to withdraw north of the Litani River and Israeli forces are to return to their side of the border. The buffer zone would be patrolled by Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers.
On Thursday, the second day of a ceasefire after more than a year of bloody conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon's state news agency reported that Israeli fire targeted civilians in Markaba, close to the border, without providing further details. Israel said it fired artillery in three other locations near the border. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
An Associated Press reporter in northern Israel near the border heard Israeli drones buzzing overhead and the sound of artillery strikes from the Lebanese side.
The Israeli military said in a statement that “several suspects were identified arriving with vehicles to a number of areas in southern Lebanon, breaching the conditions of the ceasefire.” It said troops “opened fire toward them” and would “actively enforce violations of the ceasefire agreement.”
Israeli officials have said forces will be withdrawn gradually as it ensures that the agreement is being enforced. Israel has warned people not to return to areas where troops are deployed, and says it reserves the right to strike Hezbollah if it violates the terms of the truce.
A Lebanese military official said Lebanese troops would gradually deploy in the south as Israeli troops withdraw. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media.
The ceasefire agreement announced late Tuesday ended 14 months of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that began a day after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza, when the Lebanese Hezbollah group began firing rockets, drones and missiles in solidarity.
Israel retaliated with airstrikes, and the conflict steadily intensified for nearly a year before boiling over into all-out war in mid-September. The war in Gaza is still raging with no end in sight.
More than 3,760 people were killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon during the conflict, many of them civilians, according to Lebanese health officials. The fighting killed more than 70 people in Israel — over half of them civilians — as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
Some 1.2 million people were displaced in Lebanon, and thousands began streaming back to their homes on Wednesday despite warnings from the Lebanese military and the Israeli army to stay out of certain areas. Some 50,000 people were displaced on the Israeli side, but few have returned and the communities near the northern border are still largely deserted.
In Menara, an Israeli community on the border with views into Lebanon, around three quarters of homes are damaged, some with collapsed roofs and burnt-out interiors. A few residents could be seen gathering their belongings on Thursday before leaving again.
