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Meta plans to cut 10% of UK workforce as it retires from London

Meta plans to cut more than 10% of its UK workforce and scrap Instagram’s new London hub, as the social media team retreats from the British capital in its latest restructuring attempt.

An internal document sent to staff on Wednesday said at least 687 jobs would be eliminated, mainly in London, with more than 5,000 UK employees at risk of redundancy.

The biggest cuts will hit Instagram group in London, with 250 jobs to be cut, although others will have the opportunity to move to New York. The photo app will continue to be headquartered at Meta’s main offices in Menlo Park, California.

The shaking came less than a year later meta started a major Instagram hub in London, headed by Adam Mosseri, moved to the UK capital to increase staffing levels and build scale to compete with the fast-growing competition Soon it’s TikTok.

The move comes after Meta said it plans to cut more than 20,000 jobs in recent months in cost-cutting moves described by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg as a “productive year”. . The company employed about 86,000 people globally by the end of 2022.

With its UK operations having weathered the brunt of the initial layoffs, Meta has now begun targeting one of its largest international offices.

“London bounced off slightly in the first round of cuts, probably because of the labor laws here. Now that they’ve gone deep into the US, they have to apply it more evenly,” said a former UK-based Meta manager.

Just eight months after arriving in the capital, Mosseri told staff on Wednesday that Instagram’s London hub would soon cease to exist.

He added that he’s secured the budget to move staff from London to Instagram’s New York office, and that he expects more jobs than employees are willing to move, according to employees at meeting.

“Adam is often in the office and is concerned about Meta being too focused on the US. He is trying to change that and has been forced to give up by higher forces,” said an Instagram employee.

Another said Mosseri was angry about his decision to leave London and did not want to bring his family back to the US. Meta told the Financial Times that his move to the city is always temporary.

The shake-up caused by a combination of rising inflation and other macroeconomic issues, along with disruptive changes to Apple’s privacy rules, has left investors in the dark. recent months called for the $551 billion social media company to rein in its finances.

Zuckerberg’s long-term plan to build a metaverse full of costly avatars, which won’t be profitable for years, has also wowed investors. Following a stock sell-off in 2022, its shares have rallied more than 70% this year to $215 but remained below their 2021 peak during the outbreak of the pandemic.

Meta’s cuts in the UK will also affect around 55 jobs across apps like WhatsApp and Facebook, as well as nearly 60 jobs on their Reality Labs, tasked with delivering the metaverse and its artificial intelligence teams, according to internal memos.

Other sectors affected by the job cuts include monetization and advertising, as well as data scientists, designers and user experience researchers.

Three insiders have described the strategy of job cuts in London as a “distributed approach”, randomly selecting teams to become redundant.

A former engineering manager said: “There is no logical explanation as to why certain groups are affected. Underperforming people kept their jobs while high performers lost their jobs because they happened to be on the wrong team.”

While employees have been told they can move or apply for other roles at Meta, some managers have recommended that employees at risk should start looking for work. Outside the company. A consultation process has been put in place to determine which employees will stay on the team.

“We don’t feel so safe,” said one Instagram employee who is considering moving but is concerned about having a work visa tied to Meta during times of uncertainty.

Instagram’s London office was the first international building to be established in 2013. Since then, the city has become an important location for Meta, which has the largest engineering base outside the United States. Ky.

Mosseri joined Facebook in 2008 and led the team that developed the news feed. He was appointed head of Instagram in 2018 when the original co-founders of the app left the company.

His ambitions included hiring a large team with multiple levels of seniority, but those hopes were dashed after Zuckerberg announced in February that he would cut “middle managers.” . . make decisions faster”.

According to some current employees, the result is messy workgroups in different countries, with unclear command systems and an all-time low morale with very little getting done. .

“Mark insists on meeting face-to-face. He wants everyone back in the office under his control,” said one Instagram employee.

Even so, Meta has been “shrinking” its “real estate footprint” to cut costs and reduce its presence in US offices for rent. While opening a new office at King’s Cross in central London last March, they were looking to sublease a 310,000 square foot office in Fitzrovia that they rented in 2021 and never moved into.

Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy in San Francisco.

If you have any related information, please contact cristina.criddle@ft.com and hannah.murphy@ft.com



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