Facebook declared intention to hire 10,000 workers in the European Union to develop a so-called metaverse.
A metaverse is a new computing platform where people exist and communicate in shared virtual spaces.
The company said in a blog post Sunday that those high-skilled workers will help build “the metaverse.” It is a futuristic notion for connecting people online that encompasses augmented and virtual reality.
“The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities. And Europeans will be shaping it right from the start,” the blog post reads.
“This investment is a vote of confidence in the strength of the European tech industry. It is the potential of European tech talent,” the company said.
The announcement comes as Facebook deals with the fallout of a damaging scandal and faces increased calls for regulation to curb its influence.
Earlier this month, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped working after a global outage took them offline for around six hours Monday.
The social networking platforms were down for about six hours, one of the longest outages in the history of Facebook. In addition, Facebook’s internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, were affected as well.
The company blamed an internal technical issue, which not only affected its services, but also employees’ work passes and email.
