Facebook Parent Meta To Lay Off Employees In Metaverse Silicon Unit Today

Meta is contemplating laying off employees on Wednesday (October 4) in the unit of its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division that is focused on creating custom silicon, said a Reuters report quoting two sources familiar with the matter.

On Tuesday, a post on Meta's internal discussion forum Workplace informed the Employees about the layoffs. The post stated that the employees would be notified about their status with the company by early Wednesday morning, said the report citing one of the sources.

A Meta spokesperson refused to comment on the plans. Reuters was unable to determine the number of employees that will be laid off in the silicon unit, called Facebook Agile Silicon Team, or FAST, which has approximately 600 employees, according to another source.

The FAST unit is involved in the development of custom chips to run the augmented and virtual reality hardware developed by Meta's Reality Labs division.

Meta currently manufactures a line of mixed reality headsets known as Quest and smart glasses designed with Ray-Ban eyeglass maker EssilorLuxottica that can stream video and speak with wearers via a new artificial intelligence (AI) virtual assistant.

The company is also working on augmented reality glasses that can project virtual objects onto see-through lenses, and associated smartwatches, according to one of the sources.

However, Meta has struggled to make chips that can compete with silicon produced by external providers and has turned to chipmaker Qualcomm for devices currently on the market, including both the Quest headsets and the Ray-Ban glasses.

Earlier this year, the Mark Zuckerberg company announced its decision to lay off an additional 10,000 employees. This came come just four months after the tech giant laid off 11,000 employees, or 13 percent of the company, last November. Usually, companies go for layoffs either as part of a restructuring exercise or to cut down costs.

Since the beginning of this year, several tech majors including Google, and Microsoft have announced job cuts as tech stocks have come under pressure due to rising interest rates.