Science & Technology
Meta to cut 10,000 jobs in second round of layoffs
Facebook-parent Meta Platforms (META.O) said on Tuesday it would cut 10,000 jobs this year, making it the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs as the industry braces for a deep economic downturn, Reuters reported.
Meta shares jumped 6% on the news. The widely-anticipated job cuts are part of a restructuring that will see the company scrap hiring plans for 5,000 openings, kill off lower-priority projects and “flatten” layers of middle management.
They followed the company’s first mass layoff in the fall, which eliminated more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce at the time, after a hiring spree that doubled the employee count it had as of 2020.
Worries of an economic downturn due to rising interest rates have sparked a series of mass job cuts across corporate America in recent months. Tech companies have led the way, shedding more than 290,000 workers since the start of 2022, according to tracking site Layoffs.fyi.
Meta’s purge of employees has been one of the sector’s most pronounced. On top of inflation woes, the company is also facing down unique threats to its core digital ads business while spending handsomely on Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to build a futuristic metaverse.
In a message to staff on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said most of the new cuts would be announced in the next two months, though in some cases they would continue through the end of the year, read the report.
“For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”
Zuckerberg said he planned to further reduce the size of the recruiting team, which was already hard-hit in the fall layoffs. Restructurings in the tech group would be announced in late April and cuts to business groups would come in May.
Meta also will remove multiple layers of management and ask many managers to become individual contributors, while eliminating non-engineering roles, automating more functions and at least partially reversing a commitment to “remote-first” work that Zuckerberg made amid COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, Reuters reported.
The first of the latest wave of cuts appeared to have started even before Zuckerberg’s announcement. On Friday, Meta said it was exploring “strategic alternatives” for Kustomer, a customer service company it acquired last year.
It also disbanded its skunkworks New Product Experimentation team and reassigned leader Ime Archibong to work on product for Messenger, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters. Both changes were initially reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Investors have grown wary of Zuckerberg’s prolific spending as revenue growth from Meta’s main businesses petered out amid high inflation and a digital ads pullback from the pandemic e-commerce boom.
The company also has struggled with Apple-led (AAPL.O) privacy changes and competition for young users from short video app TikTok.
At the same time, Meta has been pouring billions of dollars into its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs unit, which lost $13.7 billion in 2022, and investing in infrastructure to support its artificial intelligence usage.
Wall Street has been rewarding Meta steadily since its November restructuring, after its share price fell more than 70% earlier in 2022. The stock received another boost in February when Zuckerberg dubbed 2023 the “Year of Efficiency,” with new cost controls and a $40-billion share buyback.
The latest downsizing indicates “how desperate the company is to get costs under control as its revenues have fallen amid declining marketing budgets,” said Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Susannah Streeter, Reuters reported.
“Virtual reality is an expensive business to be in, so while (Meta) maps out a path through an uncertain landscape, it needs to find efficiencies elsewhere,” she added.
In his memo, Zuckerberg made scant mention of virtual reality and instead emphasized the company’s focus on AI, saying Meta’s single largest investment was in “advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.”
Meta has teased AI-powered “creative aids” that can generate images, videos and text but has yet to offer any such products on its apps, even as peers have launched dueling generative AI chatbots and productivity tools in recent months.
With the latest cuts, Meta expects expenses in 2023 to come in between $86 billion and $92 billion, lower than the $89 billion to $95 billion forecast previously, read the report.
Science & Technology
Ethiopian volcano erupts for first time in nearly 12,000 years
Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan.
The Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar region has erupted for the first time in almost 12,000 years, sending massive ash plumes soaring up to 14 kilometres into the atmosphere, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre.
The eruption began on Sunday and lasted several hours. Hayli Gubbi, located around 800 kilometres northeast of Addis Ababa near the Eritrean border, sits within the geologically active Rift Valley, where two major tectonic plates meet. The volcano rises roughly 500 metres above the surrounding landscape.
Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan. Satellite imagery and social-media videos captured a towering column of white smoke billowing into the sky.
The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program notes that Hayli Gubbi has no recorded eruptions during the Holocene, the period dating back about 12,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age.
Volcanologist Simon Carn of Michigan Technological University also confirmed on Bluesky that the volcano had “no record of Holocene eruptions.”
Science & Technology
Cloudflare outage easing after millions of internet users affected
A global outage at web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Tuesday afternoon after preventing people from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.
Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET. It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.
The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon’s cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat, were inaccessible due to the disruption.
Cloudflare – whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading – runs one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.
The latest outage prevented users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an emailed statement.
“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. – REUTERS
Science & Technology
China sends its youngest astronaut to ‘Heavenly Palace’ space station
China’s Shenzhou-21 space rocket and its crew including the youngest member of its astronaut corps blasted off on Friday atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, Chinese state media reported.
It was the seventh mission to the permanently inhabited Chinese space station since it was completed in 2022, Reuters reported.
Missions on China’s Shenzhou-21 spacecraft involve trios of astronauts on six-month stays in space, with veteran astronauts increasingly replaced by younger faces. First-timers Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu Fei, 32 – China’s youngest astronaut to be sent to space – were picked to participate in the programme in 2020.
Commander Zhang Lu, 48, flew on the 2022 Shenzhou-15 mission.
FIRST SMALL MAMMALS ON SPACE STATION
The Shenzhou-21 astronauts will take over from the Shenzhou-20 crew who had lived and worked on board Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace”, for more than six months. The Shenzhou-20 astronauts will return to Earth in the coming days.
The Shenzhou-21 crew were also joined by four black mice, the first small mammals to be taken to the Chinese space station. The mice will be used in experiments on reproduction in low Earth orbit.
Biannual launches have become the norm for the Shenzhou programme, which has in the past year reached new milestones with the deployment of Chinese astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk, and plans to train and send the first foreign astronaut, from Pakistan, to Tiangong next year.
The rapid advances have raised alarm bells in Washington, which is now racing to put a U.S. astronaut on the moon again before China does.
Both countries are also competing in nascent institution-building efforts, with the U.S.-led Artemis Accords on lunar exploration matched up against the Chinese and Russian-led International Lunar Research Station.
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