Meta seeks 490 job cuts in Dublin, bringing Irish layoff total to 850

It means that the tech giant will have let almost a third of its Irish staff go during the current tech downturn.

The layoffs are for full-time staff in finance, sales, marketing, analytics, operations and engineering. It is understood that the final number of redundancies will be subject to a collective consultation process, which is mandatory for mass layoffs under Irish law.

It will leave the firm’s staff headcount at around 2,100. Meta also employs thousands of non-staff contractors, although numbers here have also been impacted by layoff announcements from Meta’s contracting partners, including Accenture.

The cuts are the result of an announcement made by Mark Zuckerberg in March, where layoffs of 10,000 worldwide were flagged.

The company has informed the government and state agencies of the proposed cuts.

Mr Zuckerberg said that once the new round of layoffs are complete, the company hopes to resume hiring.

“After restructuring, we plan to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group,” he said.

He said that the new round of layoffs were to further its goal of “flattening” the organisation’s structure.

In a previous blogpost on the proposed cuts, he also blamed the global economy, saying that sluggish continues could continue for “many years”.

“Last year was a humbling wake-up call,” he said. “The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably. We scaled back budgets, shrunk our real estate footprint, and made the difficult decision to lay off 13pc of our workforce.

“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years. Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation. Given this outlook, we'll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success. In the face of this new reality, most companies will scale back their long term vision and investments.”

Mr Zuckerberg said that the company, which encompasses Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, was currently seeking “organisational efficiency, [to] dramatically increase developer productivity and tooling, optimise distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes, and more”.

Earlier this year, the company announced that the former head of Vodafone Ireland, Anne O’Leary, would become its new country head, replacing former Meta Ireland boss, Rick Kelley.