San Francisco - (AFP) - The Wall Street Journal reported that the Meta Group, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, intends to lay off thousands of employees starting this week, following the example of several companies in the field of technology in the context of the economic crisis.

Meta has about 87,000 employees worldwide, according to September 30 figures.

While publishing the most recent disappointing quarterly results recently, Group Chairman Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the company's headcount should not increase by the end of 2023, it should even decline slightly.

According to the newspaper's sources, it is expected that this will be announced on Wednesday and that thousands of employees will be affected in the first such measure in the history of the social media giant.

And last Thursday, two Silicon Valley groups, Stripe and Lyft, announced the layoffs of a large number of their employees, while the Amazon group froze hiring.

And as soon as Elon Musk, the president of Tesla and the richest man in the world, acquired the Twitter platform, he laid off about half of its 7,500 employees.

Online platforms, whose economic model is based on advertising, suffer especially from advertisers reducing their spending due to global inflation and high interest rates.

Net profit of the Metta Group fell to $4.4 billion in the third quarter of the year (-52% year-on-year).

Zuckerberg noted in late October that "we are facing a volatile macro economy, increasing competition, losing advertising, and increasing costs for our long-term investments," stressing that "our product prospects seem, from what I see, to be better off than some comments indicate."

However, the group's shares declined the next day by 24.56% on the Wall Street Stock Exchange.