Instagram will also allow users to enable a setting that automatically posts Reels, its name for short form videos, uploaded on its service to be re-posted to Facebook. The amount of time users are spending on Reels is doubling year over year with much of the recent growth coming from Facebook.

The social media and technology company is bracing for a leaner second half of the year, as it copes with macroeconomic pressures and data privacy hits to its ads business, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Thursday.

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The company must “prioritise more ruthlessly” and “operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams,” chief product officer Chris Cox wrote in the memo, which was released around the same time as Zuckerberg’s comments.

“I have to underscore that we are in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce. We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Cox wrote.

A spokeswoman for the company downplayed the note. “This was simply an internal strategy memo intended to build on what we’ve already said publicly in earnings about the challenges we face and the opportunities we have, where we’re putting more of our energy toward addressing,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.

Tech companies have scaled back their ambitions in anticipation of a possible US recession, although the slide in stock price at Meta has been more severe than at competitors Apple and Google. The world’s biggest social media company has lost about half its market value this year, after Meta reported daily active users on its flagship Facebook app had experienced a quarterly decline for the first time.

In his memo, Cox said Meta would need to increase fivefold the number of graphic processing units (GPUs) in its data centres by the end of the year to support the “discovery” push, which requires extra computing power for artificial intelligence to surface popular posts from across Facebook and Instagram in users’ feeds.

That user engagement with Reels could provide a key route to bolster the bottom line, making it important to boost ads in Reels “as quickly as possible,” he added.

Zuckerberg told investors in April that executives viewed Reels as “a major part of the discovery engine vision” that would increase revenue gradually as advertisers became more comfortable with the format.