The era of rapid growth of Meta is over, Zuckerberg announced a freeze on recruitment and restructuring of the team

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg), the parent company of Facebook, outlined a comprehensive plan to restructure its team and cut staff for the first time in its history, marking the end of the social media giant's era of rapid growth.

This will be Facebook's first major budget cut since it was founded in 2004. Zuckerberg said the company would freeze hiring and restructure some teams to cut costs and refocus. He points out that Meta in 2023 is likely to be smaller than this year.

Zuckerberg announced the decision at a weekly employee question-and-answer session. He added that the company will cut budgets for most teams, even those that are growing, and that each team will figure out how to deal with changes in the number of people on its own. This may mean that Meta will not fill post-employment vacant positions, transfer people to other teams or focus on "people who manage substandard performance".

"I had hoped that the economy would clearly stabilize now," Mr Zuckerberg said. "but from what we have seen, it does not seem to have happened yet, so we want to do some conservative planning." Meta shares fell 3.7 per cent in after-hours trading on Thursday and have fallen 60 per cent this year on the news.