Meta layoffs begin worldwide amid sweeping AI-driven restructuring
Engineering and product teams are expected to bear the brunt as the company reorganizes around AI.
Meta’s latest round of layoffs began early Wednesday morning, with employees at the company’s headquarters in Singapore receiving termination notices at 4 a.m. local time. Employees in Europe, the United States, and Israel are expected to receive similar notices in the coming hours.
The tech giant is expected to cut around 8,000 jobs today, representing roughly 10% of its workforce, as it seeks to reduce costs while sharply increasing investments in AI infrastructure and shifting more aggressively toward AI product development. The layoffs in Israel are expected to be of a similar scale to the rest of the world, meaning 80-90 employees are set to be cut. The layoffs are expected to focus primarily on engineering and product development teams. According to Bloomberg, Meta is also expected to carry out another round of cuts later this year.
Meta offices around the world are expected to remain largely empty today after the company instructed employees to work from home. According to The New York Times, employees were seen on Monday scrambling to collect snacks, chargers, and personal belongings from offices amid fears they would lose their jobs later this week.
At the same time, Meta is carrying out a sweeping AI-focused reorganization. On Monday, the company announced that 7,000 employees would be reassigned to new AI-related positions within four newly created work groups. The memo, written by Meta’s chief people officer Janelle Gale, said roughly 7,000 employees would be moved into AI-related initiatives, while many managerial roles would be removed as part of a shift toward flatter, faster-moving teams built around small “pods” or cohorts.
“As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles into their new org structures,” Gale wrote. “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.”
Meta plans to invest between $115 billion and $135 billion in AI infrastructure this year as part of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s push to strengthen the company’s position in artificial intelligence. Despite its massive spending, Meta is still under pressure from rivals such as Google, which has developed more advanced AI models and moved faster in integrating them into consumer and enterprise products.
At its annual developer conference yesterday, Google also escalated competition with Meta by unveiling AI-powered smart glasses designed to compete directly with Meta’s own wearable devices.
Before competing successfully with rival tech giants, however, Zuckerberg may first need to address growing unrest within Meta itself. According to Bloomberg, management demands that engineers increase their use of AI agents, combined with plans to monitor ongoing work and collect data from employee devices to train AI models, have fueled anxiety and frustration inside the company.
More than 1,000 employees have reportedly signed a petition calling on Zuckerberg and Meta management not to collect data from their personal devices. Others have described on social media how fears of layoffs have damaged morale and productivity.
Once the layoffs are complete, Meta’s biggest challenge may be rebuilding trust among the employees who remain and convincing them to embrace a corporate strategy increasingly centered on automation and AI efficiency. That is likely to prove difficult when the success of that strategy could ultimately make many of their own roles obsolete.
