Meta Planning Another Round of Layoffs
By Mark Hallum March 7, 2023 2:42 pm
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Making good on his word that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency,” Mark Zuckerberg may have more layoffs in the pipeline after already cutting employee overhead by 11,000 in November.
Thousands more employees of Meta may now be on the chopping block, Bloomberg reported Tuesday morning. The social media giant declined to comment on the report.
Even prior to the layoffs announced in November, which accounted for 13 percent of Meta’s total headcount, the Facebook parent company had been executing a plan to shed office space, especially in New York City.
The cutback in office alone would set the company back about $2.9 billion.
In December, Meta said that it would re-evaluate its 1.9 million-square-foot office footprint at Related Companies’ 30 Hudson Yards, which was swiftly leased up by KKR, Commercial Observer previously reported. Meta also exited its lease at 55 Hudson Yards.
As early as October 2022, Meta had terminated its 200,000-square-foot lease at 225 Park Avenue South and began moving employees into the 730,000-square-foot space it committed to in Moynihan Train Hall in 2020, CO reported at the time.
Other places where Meta has been pulling out include Austin, Texas, where it put its 589,000-square-foot space up for sublease, and The Village at San Antonio Center in Silicon Valley, which it already vacated.
Meta’s exodus from office was part of a larger trend of tech pulling back on physical space.
Tech leasing made up about 40 percent of new leases in Manhattan in the fourth quarter of 2019, but only amounted to only 5.9 percent of all new leases as of the end of 2022 , according to data from Savills.
Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.
