Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has started notifying thousands of employees worldwide that they are being sacked.
This latest round of job cuts is expected to hit Meta’s engineering and product teams in particular, and additional layoffs could come later in the year, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the company’s plans.
The -led company had announced plans to cut roughly 8,000 roles globally as part of restructuring aimed at reducing costs and driving productivity through AI-led automation.
The announcement followed Meta’s commitment of more than $100 billion to capital expenditures towards (AI). The day before, Meta informed staff that 7,000 workers had also been reassigned to newly formed teams focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents.
Starts with Singapore
Meta started by notifying employees in its Asian hub, Singapore. Employees in Singapore reportedly received emails at 4 am local time.
European and US-based staff are expected to receive word early in their time zone as well, according to an internal memo.
Meanwhile, staff are being encouraged to work from home. Meta had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March, ahead of the reassignments and layoffs.
What Meta said
In a memo, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News, Meta’s Head of People, Janelle Gale, said that organisations can now operate with smaller teams that are faster and have more accountability.
“We’re now at the stage where many organisations can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership. We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding,” the memo reportedly read.
The restructuring follows Zuckerberg making AI the company’s top priority, committing the bulk of Meta’s resources to it to keep pace with rivals like Google and.
Meta has gone through waves of layoffs over recent years, as Zuckerberg has pushed for increased efficiency, encouraged engineers to use AI agents for coding, and outlined plans to track employees’ devices to improve the technology.
Zuckerberg even spent time coding his own AI-powered assistant to handle some of his CEO duties, like soliciting employee feedback.
Meta employees exasperated
The restructuring has left Meta employees both frustrated and anxious. More than a thousand employees have signed a petition addressed to Zuckerberg and other leaders of the company demanding that it refrain from collecting their data from devices — which can be as granular as gathering keystrokes, mouse movements and screen content — in the effort to train AI.
Others have taken to social media to post about how the threat of layoffs has impacted their work and morale.
A former Meta employee, on social media platform X wrote, “My friends still there are either just waiting hoping to get laid off or extremely anxious because the job is their lifeline (sic).”
Recalling the first wave of layoffs at Meta, she added, “I remember the very first big layoff. The night before was almost like doomsday, people were stuffing their bags with free snacks and drinks and chargers.”
Investors worried too
Meta’s aggressive spending on AI has caused concern among investors too, who worry that the company’s investment may not ultimately pay off.
While Meta has framed the layoffs as an opportunity to “offset” the cost of some of its major AI investments, analysts at Evercore estimate the cuts will generate only about $3 billion in savings, Bloomberg reported.
That’s just a small portion of Meta’s projected capital expenditures this year, which could hit $145 billion, and the additional hundreds of billions that the company anticipates spending on AI infrastructure before the end of the decade.