Facebook thought pandemic online shopping would last forever. It didn’t.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made a startling admission on Wednesday during a private Zoom call for the 11,000 workers his company had just laid off: They were losing their jobs partly because he overestimated the staying power of the pandemic’s e-commerce boom.

Like many social media platforms, Meta’s revenue soared during the pandemic when the spread of the coronavirus forced many retailers to turn to the internet to reach would-be customers who were staying home to avoid the virus. Zuckerberg thought that even after vaccines allowed people to return to offline activities freely, e-commerce growth would continue to expand rapidly. He was wrong.