MENLO PARK — Facebook’s parent company Meta is slashing a further 10,000 jobs and will not fill 5,000 open positions as the social media pioneer cuts costs, it announced on Tuesday.

The company axed 11,000 jobs in November, about 13 percent of its workforce at the time.

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.

Early last month, Meta posted falling profits and its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue.

The company said on Tuesday it will reduce the size of its recruiting team and make further cuts in its tech groups in late April, and then its business groups in late May.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success”.

The company, based in Menlo Park, California, has invested billions of dollars to realign its focus on the metaverse.

In February, it said a downturn in online advertising and competition from rivals such as TikTok weighed on results.

“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision,” said Zuckerberg.

The biggest tech companies in the US are cutting costs elsewhere, too.

This month, Amazon paused construction on its second headquarters in Virginia following the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history and its shifting plans around remote work.

In early trading, Meta shares rose 6 percent. — Euronews