While cutting, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has promised to keep spending on metaverse development, even as the efforts slash the Facebook parent company’s previously healthy bottom line.

“In 2023, we expect Meta to remain engulfed in arduous battles inside the Octagon,” Monness Crespi Hardt analyst Brian White said in a research note on Thursday.

“In the long run, we believe Meta will benefit from the secular digital ad trend and innovate in the metaverse; however, regulatory scrutiny persists, internal headwinds remain, and we believe the darkest days of this downturn are ahead of us.”

Online retailer Amazon AMZN, +3.04% was the first Big Tech company to publicly declare cost-cutting was in order a year ago, and still coughed up $834 billion in market value in 2022.

“Sentiment was already bearish on AWS, with investors looking for slowing revenue over the next three quarters, largely confirmed after Microsoft earnings and conversations with industry checks,” Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein said in a note on Wednesday.

Big Tech earnings were a salve to other problems in the market for the past decade-plus, but with layoffs already under way and doubts about the path forward, don’t expect salvation from their results this week.