元Will Let Go of 11,000 Employees in Company's First Large-Scale LayoffsFacebook launched as "The Facebook" in 2004. On Wednesday, it conducted its first mass layoff, reducing headcount by about 13%.

元Platforms, the parent company of Facebook,said Wednesdayit will lay off about 11,000 employees. This is the first time in company history that it has conducted large-scale layoffs.

The cuts will reduce its employee count by about 13%, CEO Mark Zuckerbergwrote in a blog announcingthe changes to employees.

"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. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," he wrote in the post.

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元plans to start laying off large numbers of employees this week for the first time in its history, theWall Street Journalreported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Facebook launched as "The Facebook" in 2004 and has since grown to some 1.98 billion daily active users. The company had not reported adeclinein quarterly revenue until July 2022. In itsmost recent earnings report, it boasted 87,314 employees as of late September, up 28% from the same time last year.

The layoff announcement, which the WSJ reported could start Wednesday of this week, comes amid alabor bloodbathin the tech industry and anxiety about alarger economic downturn.

Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk,laid off halfthe company's staff last week. Meta is also dealing with the additional stress of its $15 billion investment in the metaverse, which has been criticized,sometimes publicly, by investors, and even thefounder of Oculus.

Although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasremained bullishon the metaverse, he has been sounding the alarm about employee cuts for months.

"Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," he told employees in June.

TheNew York Timesalso reported on Sundaythat Meta would begin layoffs, citing "three people with knowledge of the situation."

Those sources further told the NYT it would be "the job cuts were set to be the most significant at the company since it was founded in 2004," the outlet wrote.

As the WSJ reported, the layoffs could affect "thousands" of people.

元declined to comment. It pointed to remarks made by Zuckerberg at the company's most recent earnings call.

"In 2023, we're going to 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. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today," Zuckerberg said at the meeting.