Meta Platform, Inc., parent of the popular social media platform Facebook, will begin mass layoffs on Wednesday in what will likely be the biggest of the growing job cuts among high tech firms.A report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, based on sources familiar with the impending layoffs, said that &many thousands of employees& among the Meta staff of 87,000 will lose their jobs this week.Representatives from the $86 billion global tech monopoly, based in Menlo Park, California, declined to comment.The layoffs will be the largest staff reduction ever in the 18-year-old company founded and still run by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.Meta owns Facebook (2.9 billion users), Instagram (2 billion users) and WhatsApp (2 billion users), the number one, three and four most popular social media platforms in the world.Zuckerberg hinted at layoffs last month when he said the company would &focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,& and that means &most of our teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.Zuckerberg said Meta would end 2023 &either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization.In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had begun &quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers& in a drive to cut costs by 10 percent.Wall Street Journal reported that the cuts were &expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts,& and that the majority of the cost reduction would &come from reduced employment,& according to unnamed individuals familiar with the plans.Meta's move follows just days after the mass layoff of Twitter staff, which is being reduced by half from 7,500.The post Facebook parent Meta to carry out mass layoffs first appeared on Ariana News.