Inside the firm, staff describe rock‑bottom morale, intrusive AI tracking and deep scepticism that the Meta layoffs are really over.
Meta’s latest round of layoffs hit staff across the world on Wednesday, with around 8,000 employees told they were losing their jobs in a restructuring that Mark Zuckerberg has tied directly to the company’s huge artificial intelligence spending.
In an email sent to roughly 78,000 inboxes, the chief executive promised there would be no further company‑wide Meta layoffs this year and, in a rare admission, accepted that leadership had handled the run‑up badly.
Meta Layoffs And Quiet Job Reassignments
The scale and choreography of the Meta layoffs were hard to miss. According to internal documents and staff accounts, notification emails began landing at 4am local time in each region, starting in Asia, then Europe, before sweeping through the Americas.
In the United States, those affected are being offered 16 weeks’ severance pay plus a further two weeks for every year of service, along with up to 18 months of COBRA health cover for themselves and their families.
Alongside the 8,000 redundancies, around 7,000 employees are being reassigned into new AI‑focused jobs, while some 6,000 open vacancies have been shut down altogether.
In a memo later obtained by US media, Meta’s chief people officer Janelle Gale said the cuts were part of an effort to ‘run the company more efficiently’ and to offset the vast sums now being poured into AI projects.
Zuckerberg was blunter on Meta’s first‑quarter earnings call. If a team that once needed 50 or 100 people could now function with 10, he told analysts, keeping the larger group was ‘counterproductive.’
Meta Layoffs And Zuckerberg’s Two Promises To Survivors
Inside the company, the most closely parsed part of Zuckerberg’s email was not the familiar expression of ‘gratitude’ to those leaving, but two specific pledges aimed at those who stayed.
First, he told staff that Meta did ‘not expect other company‑wide layoffs this year’, the nearest thing to a stability guarantee anyone at the firm has heard for months. Second, he conceded that leadership had ‘not been as clear in communication as should have been’, and said that needed to improve.
For thousands who had spent four weeks in limbo, refreshing the internal directory to see whose name had vanished and clearing out free snacks amid rumours of ‘the big day’, that acknowledgement carried weight, even if it turned up a month late.
Employees had already signed petitions, traded gallows humour and compared the wait to being conscripted, with one hastily assembled engineering group informally nicknamed ‘the Draft’ as it absorbed around 2,000 staff.
On the same April earnings call, Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li admitted she no longer knew what the company’s ‘ideal headcount actually looks like.’
AI Spend And Staff Surveillance Lurking Behind Meta Layoffs
The financial context for the Meta layoffs is stark. The company expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion (£92.98 billion and £107.85 billion) this year, nearly double last year’s capital expenditure, with most of it directed towards what Zuckerberg calls ‘personal superintelligence.’
Executives have been open that the 8,000 jobs cut are intended to help offset that bill.
At the same time, Meta is pressing ahead with internal AI schemes that many staff see as intrusive. One programme, known as the Model Capability Initiative, tracks employees’ keystrokes, mouse movements and screen activity in order to train AI models that mimic how humans interact with computers.
More than 1,500 workers have signed a petition demanding the project be halted, with flyers taped to office windows in New York urging colleagues to push back. When one employee asked chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth how to opt out, the answer was simple: there was no opt‑out.
The company is also reportedly working on an AI ‘clone’ of Zuckerberg to answer questions from employees when he is unavailable.
Human Cost Of Meta Layoffs As Tech Workers Lose Faith
Beyond the spreadsheets and AI roadmaps, the Meta layoffs have left a trail of personal upheaval. On Blind, the anonymous workplace forum that verifies users through corporate email, current and former staff have described morale as being at rock bottom.
One worker said she had been laid off while seven months pregnant. Another wrote that employees were ‘in desperate need of therapy’ after years of rolling cuts and reorganisations dating back to 2022.
Some departing staff say they feel an unexpected sense of release. Brittany Pierson, a Dallas‑based content designer who spent more than four years at Meta, told her Instagram followers she felt ‘so much relief’ after finally being let go, arguing that if she had stayed she would have had to scramble to learn a new role AI could not easily replace while bracing for another cull, which she said was already being rumoured for August.
Others are more openly cynical. One employee affected by Wednesday’s cuts told the New York Post they believed the firm would stage a ‘performance‑based’ round later in the year so it could say it was not another mass layoff. Asked about Zuckerberg’s standing among staff, the same worker replied: ‘He doesn’t give a s***. He’s focused on his bottom line.’
Zuckerberg closed his memo with a familiar pitch, insisting that ‘success isn’t a given’ and calling AI ‘the most consequential technology of our lifetimes’, before arguing that the companies which lead will ‘define the next generation.’
The cuts had been hanging over staff since late April, when an internal memo revealed plans to shed about 10 per cent of Meta’s global workforce on 20 May.
The company, which employed around 79,000 people at the end of last year, has already carried out several previous rounds of redundancies, including hundreds of roles in its metaverse division in January.
This latest wave of Meta layoffs comes as capital spending is set to almost double to between $125 billion and $145 billion (£92.98 billion and £107.85 billion), much of it earmarked for data centres, custom chips and model training for its AI push.
