Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned of workforce cuts during the company’s third-quarter-2022 earnings call last month, and those cuts may be arriving as soon as Wednesday.

Jeff Horwitz and Salvador Rodriguez of The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the impending layoffs may impact many thousands of the company’s work force of more than 87,000, adding that Meta employees were ordered to cancel any nonessential travel beginning this week.

The moves would mark the first broad reduction in headcount in the company’s history and will likely top last week’s layoffs at Twitter in total number, but not in percentage, as reports indicate that one-half of the latter’s workforce was impacted.

Meta declined comment other than referring to Zuckerberg’s comments during last month’s earnings call, when he said in his opening remarks, “In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas. So, that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”

Those “high-priority growth areas” are the company’s ads and business messaging platforms, its artificial discovery engine powering Reels and other recommendation experiences and its future vision for the metaverse.

Chief strategy officer David Wehner added during his last earnings call as chief financial officer, “Our pace of hiring slowed in the third quarter, consistent with our previously-stated plans. We added 3,700 net new hires in the third quarter, down from our second-quarter net additions of 5,700, despite the third quarter typically being a seasonally stronger hiring period. We expect hiring to slow dramatically going forward and to hold headcount roughly flat next year relative to current levels.”