OTTAWA — In late March, Facebook parent Meta announced plans to build a new engineering hub in Toronto and hire more than 2,500 new staff over five years across the country. The technology giant’s executives, flanked by Ontario premier Doug Ford and the minister of economic development, Vic Fedeli, said at the time that the hub would play a key role in the creation of Meta’s metaverse.
Yet less than eight months later, the company made its largest recorded layoffs as a public company, cutting 11,000 global employees, including Canadian staff. Across the industry, 850 tech companies have laid off more than 136,000 workers around the world, with 45,000 of those occurring in November alone, according to data from the website layoffs.fyi.
