Canadian Meta employees took to LinkedIn on Wednesday to announce they had been laid off by the company. 

“Sadly, my Canadian agency team was part of the 11,000 people cut from Meta today,” said Toronto-based creative partnerships lead at Meta, Neil Mohan.

Teams impacted included client relations and human resources. Meta has over 1,800 Canadian employees, according to the company’s LinkedIn page, and has offices in Toronto and Montreal.

The layoffs came as a surprise as only eight months ago, Meta announced it would recruit up to 2,500 people in Canada over the next five years as part of a new Canadian engineering hub. The company said it would create the first Canadian WhatsApp, Messenger,and Remote Presence engineering teams, as well as larger Canadian Reality Labs and AI Research teams.

However, slow revenue growth reported in May of 2022 halted these plans. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a public letter on Wednesday about the firm’s recent struggles that led to the layoffs.

“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” he said. ” I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13%.”

He added that the company had cut costs across its business, “including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint.” However, those measures weren’t enough to bring expenses in line with revenue growth.

Image is by Nokia621.