After instructing directors to make lists of expendable employees last month, Meta is today pulling the trigger on Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency.”

An internal memo told managers at Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Reality Labs to prepare for job cut announcements. According to Bloomberg, who saw the memo, teams will be reorganised with some employees reassigned to work under a different manager.

This will be the first round of the 10,000 sackings announced in March. A further round of redundancies will follow in May.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg said when announcing the cuts in March.

“It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success.

“Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.

“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.”

These cuts are separate to the 11,000 workers the company axed in November.

Meta’s headcount will drop to 66,000 by the time all the cuts are implemented.