iWorld
OML’s The Circuit #SitDown Comedy Festival goes digital with Paytm Insider
MUMBAI: Tickets to OML’s multi-genre comedy festival The Circuit #SitDown Comedy Festival went live with tickets on Paytm Insider yesterday. The festival due to begin in March was called off pre-emptively after the COVID-19 outbreak in India. The festival is now back on in its digital avatar with Paytm Insider powering a seamless experience for the organisers, artists and fans.
Paytm Insider recently announced a roll-out of new features to enable organisers to publish tickets and manage their event online. The platform currently supports Zoom-based event publishing. Customers who purchase tickets get their event access details on the ticket and a reminder when the show is about to go live. This will be the first digital comedy festival of its kind using the platform’s capabilities.
Simply having the ability to perform for a “live” audience changes the experience for the artist. Paytm Insider which ticketed over 6,000 comedy shows in 2019-20 understands and values this.
Paytm Insider CEO Shreyas Srinivasan says: “We went back to the roots of what makes an event special – for an artist and for a fan. Paytm Insider is bridging the distance between the two when events are being run digitally. With our new event self-publishing features, we enable artists and organisers to once again count on ticketing revenue.”
Starting this week, Paytm Insider will also run contests to provide erstwhile IRL “meet and greet” experiences for fans, this time over video. The Circuit Comedy Festival will be on from April 22 – 26, bringing some of the best and new comedy talent straight to your screens, in fresh interactive formats.
iWorld
Meta plans 8,000 layoffs in new AI-led restructuring wave
First phase from May 20 may cut 10 per cent workforce amid AI pivot.
MUMBAI: At Meta, the future may be artificial but the cuts are very real. The social media giant is reportedly preparing a fresh round of layoffs, with an initial wave expected to impact around 8,000 employees as it doubles down on its artificial intelligence ambitions. According to a Reuters report, the first phase of job cuts is slated to begin on May 20, targeting roughly 10 per cent of Meta’s global workforce. With nearly 79,000 employees on its rolls as of December 31, the move marks one of the company’s most significant workforce reductions in recent years.
And this may only be the beginning. Sources indicate that additional layoffs are being planned for the second half of the year, although the scale and timing remain fluid, likely to be shaped by how Meta’s AI capabilities evolve in the coming months. Earlier reports had suggested that total cuts in 2026 could reach 20 per cent or more of its workforce.
The restructuring comes as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg continues to steer the company towards an AI-first operating model, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to the transition. Internally, this shift is already visible: teams within Reality Labs have been reorganised, engineers have been moved into a newly formed Applied AI unit, and a Meta Small Business division has been created to align with broader structural changes.
The trend is hardly isolated. Across the tech sector, companies are trimming headcount while investing aggressively in automation. Amazon, for instance, has reportedly cut around 30,000 corporate roles nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workforce citing efficiency gains driven by AI. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows over 73,000 tech employees have already lost jobs this year, compared with 153,000 in all of 2024.
For Meta, the move echoes its earlier “year of efficiency” in 2022–23, when about 21,000 roles were eliminated amid slowing growth and market pressures. This time, however, the backdrop is different. The company is financially stronger, generating over $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit last year, with shares up 3.68 per cent year-to-date though still below last summer’s peak.
That contrast underlines the shift underway. These layoffs are less about survival and more about reinvention. As Meta restructures itself around AI from autonomous coding agents to advanced machine learning systems, the question is no longer whether the company will change, but how many roles will be left unchanged when it does.
