Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has begun laying off approximately 8,000 employees — around 10 percent of its global workforce of 78,000 — in the first of three planned waves of redundancies. Affected workers were notified via email starting at 4am local time on Wednesday. The cuts fall hardest on staff in the company's integrity team, which handles the removal of malicious content and hate speech, as well as cybersecurity teams and content design divisions. A significant number of managerial positions have also been eliminated as the company seeks a flatter organisational structure. In addition to the layoffs, Meta has cancelled plans to fill 6,000 vacant roles and is reassigning several thousand remaining employees to AI-focused positions.

CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg framed the restructuring as a financial necessity to fund an extraordinary bet on artificial intelligence. In an email to departing staff cited by American media, he described AI as "the most consequential technology of our lifetime" and said the layoffs were needed to run the company more efficiently and finance its AI infrastructure ambitions. Meta's capital expenditure is projected to reach between $125bn and $145bn this year — more than double last year's figure — with much of that directed toward data centres and the company's Meta Superintelligence initiative.

The human cost of the transition has been significant. Employee morale at the company had already deteriorated sharply in the weeks before the announcement, after management confirmed rumours of layoffs but withheld details until 20 May. On Blind, a platform where verified employees discuss their workplaces, around 80 percent of Meta-related posts have been negative — up from just 20 percent two years ago. Adding to the tensions, Meta had been requiring staff to participate in a data-collection programme that tracked mouse movements, keystrokes, and clicks, and took random screenshots of employees' screens, including while reading emails. The data was used to train AI models to replicate how humans use computers. According to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, opting out was not possible, and more than 1,500 employees signed a petition protesting the practice. One unnamed policy worker described the situation bluntly, saying the US workforce felt it was "being used to train the AI models that will replace them."

The package for US-based employees includes 16 weeks of severance pay plus two additional weeks for each full year of service, as well as 18 months of continued health insurance coverage for workers and their families — a relatively generous arrangement by American standards. Workers outside the United States will receive packages in line with local regulations.

Meta's move is part of a broader wave of AI-driven workforce reductions across the technology sector. Cisco, the American networking giant, announced the elimination of roughly 4,000 jobs on the same day — notable because the announcement came alongside the company's highest-ever quarterly revenue. A Goldman Sachs survey estimated that AI-related layoffs now account for more than 16,000 payroll cuts per month industrywide. Meta's chief financial officer has acknowledged uncertainty about the company's "ideal size" given the pace of AI-driven change, though Zuckerberg has said no further company-wide cuts are planned for the rest of this year.