Meta Begins Laying Off 8,000 Employees Amid A.I. Transformation
Meta told employees last month that it would carry out mass layoffs on May 20, as the Silicon Valley giant tries to transform into an A.I.-first company.
Meta told employees last month that it would carry out mass layoffs on May 20, as the Silicon Valley giant tries to transform into an A.I.-first company.
For the last month, employees at Meta have been on edge.
In April, they were told that 8,000 of them, or 10 percent of the work force, 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 A.I. initiatives.
The ax started to fall in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time on Wednesday emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere will be notified early Wednesday morning in their respective time zones.
Meta’s offices were set to be mostly empty on Wednesday after Janelle Gale, the company’s head of human resources, told employees this week that they should work from home. On the office walls, some workers had hung up fliers sharing a petition to stop Meta’s new program to track their data for A.I. training, 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 of layoffs in the A.I. age. Last week, the networking giant Cisco said it would eliminate 4,000 jobs as it shifted more resources to A.I. Microsoft, Block and Coinbase recently announced layoffs or buyouts because of the powerful technology.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has staked his company on A.I. 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 A.I.
But the company’s transformation from a social networking firm to an A.I.-first entity has been far from smooth. Employees have said the embrace of A.I. has led to anger and anxiety across Meta’s 78,000 person work force, according to 13 current and former employees.
