Meta, the parent company of the social media platform Facebook, is looking to cut costs by 10% or more over the coming months. It recently reported its first-ever revenue decline in Q2 and is expected to record another drop when Q3 numbers come next week.
As such, Facebook’s shuttle bus staffers are to lose their jobs. A key vendor that Meta uses for its commuter shuttles, WeDriveU, will be reducing its staff in and around Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters by nearly 100 people beginning in November. Hallcon Corporation, Meta shuttle vendor, will be laying off 63 staffers from its San Francisco location on November 25. Meta has also cut shuttle staffers with other contractor firms. The dropback is attributed to the ongoing macroeconomic challenges and Meta’s general underperformance. Meta is pulling back on costs and maintaining more flexibility than its tech peers in allowing employees to work from wherever they want.
Since rebranded as Meta and shifting of focus to the metaverse, Facebook is struggling to gain traction. Its free virtual reality online game Horizon Worlds has failed to meet internal performance expectations. Moreover, internal documents suggest that the transition to the metaverse would take the company years to fully achieve. A report highlighted that Horizon’s vast collection of virtual spaces where users appear as avatars and interact with others across the world are sparsely used, with only 9% of worlds built by creators being visited by at least 50 people and many never being visited again.
