Meta lays off 8,000 employees, as AI casualties mount

SAN FRANCISCO >> For the last month, employees at Meta have been on edge.

In April, they were told that 8,000 of them, or 10% of the workforce, would be laid off on May 20 as Meta remade itself for the artificial intelligence era. On Monday, they learned that another 7,000 employees would be reassigned to new AI initiatives.

The ax fell today. The layoffs began in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time, emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere were notified early this morning in their respective time zones.

Many workers began exchanging somber messages remotely and checked the internal directory to figure out who on their teams had been cut. On Meta’s internal forums, hundreds reacted to the layoffs with salad emoji, their way to say “salute.” At least one person who was hired within the past month was laid off, two people with knowledge of the job cuts said.

Meta’s offices were mostly empty today after Janelle Gale, the company’s head of human resources, told employees this week that they should work from home. On the office walls, flyers sharing a petition to stop Meta’s new program to track employee data for AI training were visible, eight employees said. Some workers scavenged the offices for free snacks and laptop chargers on Monday in case they no longer had jobs by the end of the week, said the employees, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.

The turmoil at Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — offers an up-close look at layoffs in the AI age. Job cuts at tech companies in the name of the fast-evolving technology have gathered steam. Tech workers, it is becoming clear, have been creating their own AI replacements. Last week, the networking giant Cisco said it would eliminate 4,000 jobs as it shifted more resources to AI. Microsoft, Block and Coinbase also recently announced layoffs or buyouts because of the technology.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has been vocal about staking his company on AI. He has said he wants to create “superintelligence,” an advanced AI that can act as the ultimate personal assistant. Last month, Meta said it would spend between $125 billion and $145 billion — more than double what it spent in 2025 — this year, much of it on AI.

But the company’s transformation from a social networking firm to an AI-first entity has been far from smooth. Employees have said the embrace of AI has led to anger and anxiety across Meta’s 78,000-person workforce, according to 13 current and former employees. The frustration was heightened by Meta’s strong financial performance, with the company reporting record revenue last month, leading to questions about why job cuts were needed.

In a note to employees this morning, Zuckerberg said he was grateful to those who were laid off for their work and optimistic about the company’s AI efforts. More companywide layoffs were not expected this year, he said.

“Success isn’t a given. AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The companies that lead the way will define the next generation.”

Before the cuts, hundreds of employees in New York gathered for drinks Tuesday night to “commiserate or celebrate, pick your poison,” according to a copy of an invitation seen by The New York Times. The title of the event: “Never a dull moment [salute emoji].”

More than 1,000 employees have signed the petition to stop the AI data tracking program, while others have rallied around internal posts critiquing top leadership. But as Zuckerberg pushes forward with AI, employees are wrestling with how, or whether, they can do anything to change course.

“AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion. It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Mack Ward, a software engineer at Meta, wrote in a post to employees this month, which was liked by more than 2,000 people, encouraging them to sign the petition. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, addressed some concerns in a question-and-answer session last week. There are “a tremendous number of employees feeling anxieties about their futures,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by the Times. “It’s all bad. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat that.”

Executives have taken steps to retain who they see as key talent. One director-level employee was offered additional equity worth roughly $500,000 to stay, two people familiar with the matter said, a tactic that Meta also used to keep certain employees during its last round of layoffs. Some refused the offers and left, the people said.

Workers who were laid off were given 16 weeks of severance pay, plus an additional two weeks for every year they worked at the company.

This month, Meta began enlisting hundreds of employees to work for a new team led by Maher Saba, a vice president of engineering, called Applied AI and Engineering, five of the employees said. Some workers began referring to the effort as a “Draft.”

Saba’s new team, which has around 2,000 employees, will use the data gathered by the employee tracking program to create AI tools, four employees said. It will have fewer layers of management than other parts of Meta, with around 50 workers reporting to each manager. Those who joined the group would be safe from the layoffs, the company said.

In an email to managers this month about the new AI team, Meta instructed them to emphasize to employees that it was “a high priority initiative, directly from Mark.”

Participation was not optional, the message said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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