Meta Slashes Further Jobs With Australian Execs In The Firing Line

Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has cut further roles overnight as part of its plan announced in March to remove 10,000 jobs throughout its business.

This is expected to be the third and final round of cuts and 6,000 staff are expected to be affected globally. Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency” to help Meta stem its losses and continue to grow.

B&T has been told by someone familiar with the matter that the Australian office has been hit particularly hard during this latest round of redundancies.

In particular, Paul McCrory, Meta’s group industry director, and Steve Coll, head of the Facebook creative shop ANZ, are both understood to have left the business, pending the statutory consultation period. McCrory had been with Meta for almost a decade while Coll joined in July 2019 from WiTH collective.

It is understood that the global cuts have hit non-engineering roles most heavily as Zuckerberg said in March that the business teams would be “substantially” restructured and returned to a “more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles.”

When reached for comment by B&T, Meta’s Australian team said that they were unable to comment on the job cuts and had no visibility over exactly which roles had been cut. They did stress that any redundancies in Australia were subject to the statutory consultation period. Meta also confirmed that while the Australian office has no engineering function, it had not been hit unduly hard in terms of the raw numbers of layoffs.

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Ellie Rogers, another industry director at Meta, recently reappeared at Snap after leaving Zuckerberg’s firm in January.

On Tuesday, Meta was hit with a record €1.2bn (almost AU$2 billion) fine from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission after it was found to have transferred Facebook user data from the European Union (EU) to the US and contravened the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

While the two are not linked, the timing is far from convenient for Meta. However, in the wake of the layoff news, Meta’s shares were up by 0.5 per cent as the market in the US closed.

In April, Meta revealed that its overall company revenue had climbed three per cent but that its Reality Labs division, which is leading the metaverse’s development, had lost more than AU$6 billion.

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