Key Points:
- Meta plans to lay off roughly 10% of its global workforce, terminating close to 8,000 employees starting May 20.
- The company plans to execute a second round of layoffs later this year, depending on advances in artificial intelligence.
- Tech giants like Amazon and Block also recently slashed thousands of jobs to increase efficiency through AI.
- Meta currently employs nearly 79,000 people and generated over $200 billion in revenue last year.
Meta is preparing to make massive cuts to its global workforce. According to three sources familiar with the internal plans, the company intends to conduct its first wave of sweeping layoffs on May 20. This initial round of cuts will serve as the opening move in a much larger corporate restructuring effort planned for this year. The sources shared these details with Reuters on the condition of anonymity because the plans remain strictly confidential.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram plans to slash about 10% of its entire global workforce in this initial wave. One of the sources confirmed that this first round will eliminate close to 8,000 employees across various departments. However, the bloodletting will not stop there. The three sources confirmed that the company is actively planning further layoffs for the second half of the year. While the exact date and size of the second round remain unsettled, executives might adjust their final numbers based on how fast their new artificial intelligence capabilities develop.
Rumors of these massive cuts have swirled around the company for weeks. Last month, Reuters reported that Meta was secretly planning to lay off 20% or more of its global workforce before the end of the year. When reporters asked for clarification this week, Meta officially declined to comment on either the timing or the scope of the planned cuts.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is currently shifting the entire focus of his massive empire. He is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars directly into artificial intelligence research and development. Zuckerberg desperately wants to dramatically reshape his company’s inner workings around this powerful new technology. His strategy reflects a much broader pattern playing out among major United States companies this year, particularly within the ruthless tech sector.
Other tech giants are making the same brutal calculations. Amazon recently trimmed roughly 30,000 corporate employees over the last few months, completely wiping out nearly 10% of its white-collar workforce. Meanwhile, in February, the financial technology company Block chopped nearly half of its entire staff. In both cases, the top executives publicly tied the massive job cuts directly to new efficiency gains from artificial intelligence.
The human cost of this sudden technological shift is staggering. Layoffs.fyi, a popular website that closely tracks tech job cuts worldwide, reported grim statistics. The site shows that 73,212 tech employees have already lost their jobs so far this year. To put that massive number in perspective, the total for 2024 was 153,000.
For Meta, these upcoming layoffs will be the social media giant’s most significant bloodletting since its massive restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023. Zuckerberg famously dubbed that specific period the “year of efficiency,” during which he ruthlessly eliminated about 21,000 jobs. During that previous restructuring, Meta’s stock was in a terrifying freefall. The company was desperately struggling to correct massive COVID-era growth assumptions that ultimately proved completely unsustainable in the real world.
The situation looks very different today. The company sits in a much more comfortable financial position this time around. However, executives now envision a corporate future with far fewer middle-management layers and much greater daily efficiency, enabled by AI-assisted workers. The financial markets love this lean strategy. Meta’s shares are up 3.68% since the start of the year. Last year, the tech giant generated more than $200 billion in revenue and posted a massive $60 billion profit, all while spending an astronomical amount on artificial intelligence research.
According to its latest official corporate filing, the Menlo Park, California-based company employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31. To prepare for the new AI-driven future, Meta has spent the recent weeks quietly reorganizing its internal teams. Executives completely restructured the Reality Labs division and aggressively transferred top engineers from across the company into a brand-new “Applied AI” organization.
This new, highly specialized AI group carries a massive responsibility. Zuckerberg tasked the team with rapidly accelerating the development of complex AI agents capable of automatically writing computer code and performing complex corporate tasks autonomously. As part of this massive restructuring, one source noted that the company will also transfer some current staffers to a brand-new unit called Meta Small Business, which executives set up last month.
