Meta announces 5% cuts targeting poor performers. Read the note

Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing employees, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed employees of the decision to “move out low performers faster” in a memo posted on the company’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday. Zuckerberg told employees that 2025 will “be an intense year.”

The company specified that it is “leaving approximately 5% of our bottom line” in a separate announcement posted by a company executive. Meta has more than 72,000 employees, according to its latest quarterly report.

Meta said employees affected by the layoffs will be notified on Feb. 10 and receive severance pay consistent with what the company previously provided. The cuts represent Meta’s biggest layoffs since it eliminated 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

Bloomberg was the first to report the cuts, citing a internal memo.

The move follows several major operational changes within Meta aimed at building closer ties with President-elect Donald Trump.

Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a “Community Notes” model used on Elon Musk’s platform X, where individual users provide more context to posts.

“The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point toward once again prioritizing speech, so we want to return to our roots and focus on reducing error, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech on our platforms,” ​​Zuckerberg said in a press release. video message.

Below is Zuckeberg’s internal memo obtained by CNBC.

Meta works to build some of the most important technologies in the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media. It’s going to be an intense year and I want to make sure we have the best people on our team.

I have decided to raise the level of performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage people who don’t live up to expectations over the course of a year, but now we’ll be making more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle with the intention of back-filling those roles in 2025. We’ll t manage everyone who didn’t live up to last term expectations if we are optimistic about their future performance and for those we let go we will provide generous severance pay in line with what we provided in the past cuts.

We are following up with more guidance for managers prior to calibrations. Affected individuals will be notified on February 10, or later for individuals outside the United States