Meta will confirm the severity of its planned layoffs this week, with an announcement due to come on Wednesday.

Thousands of employees are expected to be fired from the company, dwarfing even Elon Musk’s recent Twitter cull.

This will mark the first staff reduction in the company’s 18-year history, and follows a period of rapid hiring during the pandemic. Meta’s total employee count has since blown out to 87,000 workers.

Zuckerberg froze hiring at the end of September, explaining “we want to make sure we’re not adding people to teams where we don’t expect to have roles next year”, during a weekly staff Q&A.

“For the first 18 years of the company, we basically grew quickly basically every year, and then more recently our revenue has been flat to slightly down for the first time,” he explained.

Individual teams will be responsible for their own “headcount changes” which could include having to “manage out people who aren’t succeeding.”

“I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilised by now,” Zuckerberg said.

“But from what we’re seeing it doesn’t yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively.”

Zuckerberg reiterated this during Meta’s third quarter earnings call at the end of last month, saying the company will “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”

“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.

“In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organisation than we are today.”