Meta tells employees to work from home, prepares to axe 10,000

Meta told its North American-based employees to work from home on Wednesday as it geared up for a second round of layoffs that will claim 10,000 jobs — provoking outrage from the tech giant’s workers.

Facebook’s parent company told managers that announcements on the layoffs — part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to make the firm more efficient — would be made as soon as Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News.

The job cuts will affect positions at the flagship social network, Facebook, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Reality Labs virtual reality division, according to the report.

“It’s about to be Hunger Games out here,” one Meta employee wrote on the Blind social media app.

Meta told its managers that teams will be reshuffled and those who will remain with the company can expect to work under new supervisors, according to the report by Bloomberg.

The company has told its employees in the US and Canada that they ought to work from home if they can do so in order to process the news, according to Bloomberg.

“My partner works there and we are pretty worried,” a tech worker wrote on Blind.

Another tech worker fumed on Blind: “Feeling bad for all the people who cannot get a good nights sleep waiting to refresh their logins tomorrow.”

“No one deserves this!” the worker added. “Meta definitely can afford not laying off folks. This madness will destroy the company.”

An additional round of job cuts at Meta is expected to be announced next month, according to Bloomberg News.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment to Bloomberg News. Instead, the spokesperson referred the news agency to a March blog post by Zuckerberg in which he lays out his vision for 2023 as a “year of efficiency.”

Shares of Meta were trading some 0.44% lower in pre-market activity on Wednesday morning.

In November, Meta slashed 13% of its workforce — or 11,000 employees out of a global headcount of more than 87,000 people.

The company has also kept in place a hiring freeze.

Meta appears to have taken a page out of the McDonald’s playbook.

Earlier this month, the Chicago-based fast food giant told its corporate employees who are normally called into the office three days a week to work remotely — just days before it announced hundreds of layoffs.

McDonald’s made the decision to keep workers remote “out of respect,” and to “provide dignity, confidentiality, and comfort to our colleagues,” a source told The Wall Street Journal.

The Post has sought comment from Meta.

Meta’s multiple rounds of layoffs roiled staffers but have been well received among investors.

The company’s stock has surged more than 62% since the start of the year.

Meta and other tech companies have been hiring aggressively for at least two years and in recent months have begun to let some of those workers go.

Hiring in the US is still strong, but layoffs have hit hard in some sectors.

In February, Meta posted falling profits and its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue.

On the same day, the company said that it would buy back as much as $40 billion of its own stock.