Before the wave of layoffs, Meta closed one of its offices in Brazil

Before announcing the cut of 11 thousand employees this Wednesday (9), Meta went through a downsizing of offices that reached Brazil. The Infinity Tower will no longer house the brand’s employees. Until the afternoon of this Wednesday, the company did not disclose information about layoffs in Brazil.

The building in which Meta closed its office is located in Itaim Bibi, west of São Paulo, where companies such as Apple and Goldman Sachs operate.

The office that was in the building ceased to be the brand’s main office in Brazil in January of this year, when a space was opened at B32, in Faria Lima, the financial heart of the city.

This new office was not affected by downsizing, as was Meta’s other workspace in Brazil, in Brasília.

According to the company, the measure was taken to meet new forms of work, such as hybrid and remote, and there were no layoffs at the time. The home office has become the rule in the technology sector after the social isolation imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic in the last two years.

“To support this evolution, we announced in October that we are implementing desktop sharing,” Meta said in a statement. “And to maintain efficient use of spaces, since October we have also been optimizing the occupancy of our offices in some locations, including São Paulo.”

The company says the downsizing has nothing to do with the mass layoffs announced on Wednesday.

In the wake of other big techs that have announced layoffs in the last month, such as Twitter and Microsoft, Meta will lay off 13% of its staff, which corresponds to 11 thousand employees.

The mass layoffs were the first in the company’s 18 years of existence, and it’s one of the biggest in tech this year. The parent of platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp struggles with rising costs and a weak advertising market.

The explosion of technology use during the pandemic, coupled with low interest rates from central banks around the world, has boosted investments in technology companies in recent years. Today, many companies in the sector are cutting costs in the face of high inflation and fast-rising interest rates.

with Reuters