They are already bleeding ad revenue, badly.
But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.
We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.
Stripe and Twitter took a lot of heat off of Meta; if they had done this in March it’d be a whole different story.
If your belief that it’s macro trends rather than individual company performance that’s depressing share value it could be a very profitable time to change roles (assuming you can, obviously there’s also an influx of people looking for work in the past few weeks).
You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested.
So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.
My take would be:
* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.
* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.
* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.
* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.