Meta has announced it will lay off 11,000 employees or around 13 percent of the company’s total staff. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this news in a blog post, saying he was at fault for being overoptimistic about the company’s future growth based on a pandemic surge.

“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” said Zuckerberg. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

Zuckerberg said the company would shift more resources on “a smaller number of high priority growth areas,” including ads, AI, and the metaverse. Meta reported some 87,000 employees in September, and the cuts mark the first broad layoffs since the firm’s founding in 2004.

Why has Meta been hit so hard? Well, a projected downturn in the US economy has blunted momentum for many tech stocks, but the company’s prospects have also been affected by both strong competition from rivals and wayward strategy.

As the bad news has piled up, Meta’s stock has cratered. Its stock price has dropped more than 70 percent this year, and it’s lost $700 billion in market value in recent weeks.