March 14 (UPI) -- Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced Tuesday that it would lay off 10,000 more employees and close hiring for 5,000 open roles.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the layoffs would start this week and impact the company's recruiting organization. A second wave of layoffs will hit the tech sector and a third one will impact the business roles.
"This will be tough and there's no way around that. It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success," Zuckerberg said in a memo. "They've dedicated themselves to our mission and I'm personally grateful for all their efforts. We will support people in the same ways we have before and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve."
The announcement comes after the company previously announced that it would lay off 11,000 employees in November after Zuckerberg previously said that increased investments in the company had backfired.
"Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected," he said.
The New York Times reported in February that Zuckerberg had said that he did not want the company to be overstuffed with a layer of middle management, or "managers managing managers."
Zuckerberg has been spending billions of dollars on the "metaverse," an effort to create a virtual-reality world.