What's going on?

Meta announced the biggest staff cut in the company’s history on Wednesday.

What does this mean?

Meta’s dismal report from last month revealed its second-straight quarterly drop in revenue and piling losses from its risky metaverse bet. Investors dropped Meta like a hot potato, wiping more than $89 billion from the firm’s already shriveling market value. And given there’s very little chance that fired-up competitors will take a breather, or that budget-conscious clients will ramp up their ad spending, that downward trend could stick around. But Zuckerberg has a plan: Meta announced on Wednesday that it was laying off 11,000 employees – about 13% of its workforce – in the biggest cull in the company’s history. Other cost-saving measures are on the cards too, with budgets, perks, and even whole offices on the chopping block. But that bad news for staff could be good news for profit, which might be why investors sent its shares up 3% after the news.

Why should I care?

Zooming in: The great leveler.
The last few months have shown that no one’s immune to the effects of the global economic slowdown, not least tech companies that are rushing to cut staff to save cash. Case in point: Salesforce announced a plan to cut jobs this week, while Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet have all slowed or paused their own hiring too. At least Twitter’s demonstrated what not to do: the firm laid off around half of its workforce last week after Musk took the helm, but has already started pleading for some of them to come back (tweet this).

The bigger picture: Tik, tok, boom.
TikTok’s often seen as Meta’s main rival in the battle for the world’s attention, which likely inspired Meta to create Reels – a format similar to TikTok’s bite-sized videos. But right now it looks like even TikTok’s feeling the burn, with its parent company ByteDance cutting a chunky $2 billion from this year’s ad revenue targets on Wednesday.