The first big tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs as the sector prepares for a severe economic downturn was Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, which announced on Tuesday that it would eliminate 10,000 jobs this year.

On the news, Meta's stock increased by 6%. The much-awaited job cuts are a part of a restructuring that will also see the company kill off lower priority projects, "flatten" middle management layers, and abandon hiring plans for 5,000 openings.

They came after the organization's first round of mass layoffs in the fall, which resulted in the loss of more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce at the time, and came after a hiring frenzy that increased its workforce by a factor of two by the year 2020.

Concerns about an impending economic downturn brought on by rising interest rates have recently sparked a wave of widespread job cuts across corporate America. According to tracking site Layoffs.fyi, tech companies have been leading the way, laying off more than 290,000 workers since the year 2022.

One of the most pronounced employee purges in the industry has been at Meta. In addition to struggling with inflation, the business is also dealing with distinct threats to its core digital advertising business and lavishly investing in Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's plans to create a futuristic metaverse.

The majority of the new layoffs, according to Zuckerberg's message to the staff on Tuesday, will be announced in the next two months, though some will last through the end of the year.

"I believe that we should be ready for the possibility that this new economic reality will last for a very long time."

The recruiting team, which had already been severely impacted by the fall layoffs, will now be even smaller, according to Zuckerberg. In late April, the tech group would undergo restructuring, and in May, the business groups would experience cuts.

Along with eliminating non-engineering roles, automating more tasks, and at least partially reversing a commitment to "remote-first" work that Zuckerberg made amid COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, Meta will also remove multiple layers of management and ask many managers to become individual contributors.

Before Zuckerberg's announcement, the first of the most recent round of layoffs appeared to have begun. On Friday, Meta announced that it was looking into "strategic alternatives" for Kustomer, a customer service business it had previously purchased.

According to an internal memo, it also disbanded its skunkworks New Product Experimentation team and reassigned its leader Ime Archibong to work on a product for Messenger. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report both changes.

As revenue growth from Meta's core businesses slowed down due to high inflation and a pullback in digital advertising from the epidemic e-commerce boom, investors grew wary of Zuckerberg's extravagant spending.

The business has also struggled with Apple's privacy changes and competition from the short-form video app TikTok for young users.

In addition, Meta has been investing in infrastructure to support its use of artificial intelligence while pouring billions of dollars into its Reality Labs unit, which is focused on the metaverse and lost $13.7 billion in 2022.

Since November's restructuring, which came after Meta's share price fell by more than 70% earlier in 2022, Wall Street has been steadily rewarding the company. When Zuckerberg declared 2023 the "Year of Efficiency," with new cost controls and a $40 billion share buyback, the stock received another boost in February.

Recent layoffs show "how desperate the company is to get costs under control as its revenues have fallen amid declining marketing budgets," according to Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Susannah Streeter.

Instead of focusing on virtual reality, Zuckerberg stressed the importance of AI in his memo. He stated that Meta had made its single largest investment in "advancing AI and building it into every one of our products."

Although peers have recently released competing generative AI chatbots and productivity tools, Meta has teased AI-powered "creative aids" that can generate images, videos, and text but has yet to make any such products available on its apps.

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.