Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has started laying off some eight thousand employees as part of a previously announced restructuring as the social media giant continues to accelerate its push toward Artificial intelligence. The job cuts will affect Meta employees around the world, with those affected in Asian countries receiving the dreaded notification at 4 am Singapore time on Wednesday.
Meta severance package
According to a Business Insider report, in the US will receive a severance package including 16 weeks or four months of base pay, plus two weeks for every year of continuous employment. They’ll also get 18 months of healthcare coverage for themselves and their families, triple the previous amount.
Impacted employees outside the US will receive similar packages that vary by country.
Meta layoffs 2026
Meta Platforms, which is currently the 10th most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation, has carried out several rounds of layoffs in recent years. In its latest round of job cuts, is letting go of nearly 10 per cent of its staff, with engineering, product, and content design teams reportedly taking the hardest hit. The company also scrapped 6,000 open roles and forcibly transferred 7,000 employees into AI-native organizations.
What Meta’s HR chief said
Meta’s HR chief Janelle Gale, in a Monday memo, said that managerial positions would be cut across the company to create flatter organizational structures.
“We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” she wrote.
Previous Meta layoffs
This comes little over six months after Meta laid off around 600 roles from its AI division to trim overlapping teams after internal restructuring in October 2025.
According to online trackers, since 2022, Meta has laid off more than 30,000 employees as has doubled down on efficiency as the company pushes forward with its heavy investment in AI. The company has committed well in excess of $100 billion to AI capital expenditures this year.
Meta’s AI push
He has also encouraged engineers to use AI agents to assist with coding and other tasks, outlined plans to track employees’ devices to improve the technology. According to Blomberg, Zuckerberg also spent time coding his own AI-powered assistant to handle some of his CEO duties, like soliciting employee feedback.
“Automators like Meta risk no longer being an employer of choice as it’s being revealed that they will cut out the human when the opportunity presents itself,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Oxford, told Bloomberg. “Doing so might well lead to short-term cost savings but risks longer-term growth potential by undermining employee wellbeing and engagement.”
As Meta continues to invest in AI, the aggressive spending has caused concern among investors, 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.