New Delhi: The Facebook parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., announced on Wednesday that it would eliminate 11,000 employees, or 13% of its staff. After terminating the services of employees, Mark Zuckerberg said that he “will take the blame” for firing the employees.

“The teammates who will be leaving us are talented and passionate, and have made an important impact on our company and community. Each of you have helped make Meta a success, and I’m grateful for it. I’m sure you’ll go on to do great work at other places,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive officer in a blogpost.

“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.

“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 said.

With a few exceptions, Meta will continue its employment moratorium through Q1 of 2023.

“I’m going to watch our business performance, operational efficiency, and other macroeconomic factors to determine whether and how much we should resume hiring at that point,” said Zuckberg.

Every team inside the organisation would be impacted by the layoffs. The employees fired will get 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap. The company will also provide three months of career support with an external vendor, including early access to unpublished job leads to all those who have been laid off, he further added.

Apple, Meta, Twitter, Amazon, and other large internet companies have been feeling the heat of the global economic slump. Market research firm Crunchbase claims that as of October 2022, US-based technology companies had let go more than 45,000 employees.

Given the sensitivity of the data they accessed, the departing employees will eventually lose access to most Meta systems. However, their email addresses will be accessible all day so that everyone can bid them farewell.

Days prior to the news, another major social media company, Twitter, cut its global workforce in half.