Staff at Meta Ireland are beginning to find out whether they will lose their jobs as part of a series of cuts announced by the Facebook owner last month.
The technology giant said in January it expects to cut about 5 per cent of its workforce, focusing on “low-performers”, globally. It intends to fill the roles again later this year.
A spokesman for Meta declined to confirm how many jobs at the group’s operations in the Republic, where it directly employs around 2,000 people, would be affected. However, if the cuts were proportionate, around 100 jobs could go here.
The WhatsApp and Instagram owner also employs contractors in addition to its 2,000 staff.
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Meta has now started to tell staff whether they are affected by the latest round of cuts.
“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a memo to staff last month.
“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
The company expects to reach 10 per cent of “non-regrettable” attrition by the end of the current performance cycle, which includes roughly 5 per cent attrition from 2024, the memo showed.
“This means we are aiming to exit approximately another 5 per cent of our current employees who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating,” the company said.
Mr Zuckerberg noted the group would “provide generous severance”.
The group has cut more than 800 jobs here in recent years, starting in late 2022, amid a wider tech sector downturn that followed a period of expansion during the pandemic.
Meta has edged closer to a $2 trillion valuation in recent days after a more than two-week rally in its share price after announcing plans to invest as much as $65 billion in artificial intelligence projects in 2025, much more than had been expected.
Mr Zuckerberg also announced last month that Meta would end fact-checking on its platforms in the US, named Republican Joel Kaplan as global policy chief and added UFC chief executive and Donald Trump ally Dana White as a board member.
The company has also rolled back its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.
Taking aim at European regulators, Mr Zuckerberg said in January that Meta, which has been accused of violating EU competition rules, would work with “president Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going against American businesses”.
Last week, Mr Kaplan said Meta would not sign an EU-sponsored code of practice for advanced AI models, calling it “unworkable and infeasible.”
