Meta: number of employees 2004-2022
How many employees does Meta have?
Meta (formerly Facebook Inc.) has come a long way since its humble beginnings in a Harvard dorm room. The social network had 86,482 full-time employees as of December 2022, up from just 150 people in 2006. Although 2022 saw a 20 percent increase in its overall workforce compared with 2021, Meta made the decision to layoff approximately 11,000 employees in 2022. CEO Mark Zuckerberg cited macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss as the main causes of reduced revenue.
Facebook: how it all began In 2003, a sophomore at named Mark Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of the university's computer network in order to find photos of other students. He then would pair two of them next to each other on a program called “Facemash” and ask users to choose the more attractive person. At the beginning of 2004, Zuckerberg launched “The Facebook,” a social network dedicated to Harvard students, which later grew to encompass Columbia, Yale and Stanford. The popularity of this new service sky-rocketed and in mid-2004, Zuckerberg interrupted his studies and moved his operation to Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. By 2006, Facebook was open to the general public. In 2020, the company reported almost 86 billion U.S. dollars in revenue and a net income of 29.15 billion US dollars. It is also the most popular social network in the world, with 2.7 billion monthly active users as of December 2020.
Facebook employee diversity criticism Like many other tech companies, Facebook has been criticized for having a diversity problem. As of June 2020, tech positions, as well as management roles in U.S. offices were overwhelmingly occupied by men. Furthermore, almost 41 percent of Facebook employees in the U.S. are White and only 3.9 percent are African-American, which has sparked concern regarding representation and equal opportunities. Around 63.2 percent of senior level positions are occupied by White employees and only 4.3 percent by Hispanic-Americans.
