Why Mark Zuckerberg had to announce 11,000 job cuts at Meta

Company thought rise in online activity would last, rivals stole its users, and metaverse was too uncertain for shareholders

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There are a lot of reasons why Mark Zuckerberg felt he had no choice but to institute a bruising wave of 11,000 redundancies at Meta.

The company behind Facebook had overextended, he said. Like many of its competitors, it believed the rise in online activity during the coronavirus pandemic was a permanent shift: that although people were forced to turn to e-commerce, video chats and online gaming because they couldn't leave their homes, they would choose to carry on living that way once restrictions were lifted.