U.S. tech giant Meta said on Tuesday that the company is cutting an additional 10,000 workers in its second round of massive layoffs.

"This will be tough and there's no way around that," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, adding that the layoffs will be in service of building a leaner, more technical company and improving business performance to enable long-term vision.

The layoffs will hit recruiting, tech, business and international teams and may take until the end of the year to complete, Zuckerberg noted.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp previously laid off around 11,000 workers in November 2022. With 21,000 total layoffs, the Menlo Park-based social media company has made the deepest cuts among tech companies so far, exceeding Amazon's 18,000 cuts.

In Meta's February earnings report, Zuckerberg told investors that the company's management theme for 2023 is the "Year of Efficiency."

Meta's workforce at the end of 2022 was up 20 percent from the prior year and nearly double its size before the pandemic in 2019. The two rounds of layoffs are expected to reduce the company's headcount to around 65,000 workers.