Menlo Park, California, May 20, 2026, 04:10 PDT
Meta Platforms started sending layoff notices to employees early Wednesday, kicking off a planned reduction of about 10% of its global workforce, or close to 8,000 jobs. The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is moving staff and budgets toward artificial intelligence. Layoff notifications went out in waves starting at 4 a.m. local time in different regions. U.S. workers were told to stay home, according to Business Insider.
Meta’s AI reorganization hit staff directly this week as the company started layoffs and reassigned over 7,000 workers to AI projects, according to Reuters. Management layers are being cut too, with about 20% of Meta’s workforce affected by layoffs or transfers.
Meta is making these cuts while it pours money into one of the biggest AI infrastructure pushes in tech. Last month, the company put its 2026 capital expenditures at $125 billion to $145 billion, an increase from the previous range of $115 billion to $135 billion. The spending covers things like new data centers, equipment and finance leases.
Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale told workers in a memo that teams had taken up “AI native design principles” and were ready for “a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” Reuters reported. Meta declined to comment to Reuters about the plan. Reuters
Meta is moving some staff to projects tied to AI agents, software designed to do jobs with little human input. The Guardian said some workers are shifting to teams handling AI cloud infrastructure and a Meta internal AI agent called Hatch. Peter Hoose, Meta’s VP of production engineering, told employees in a memo that “our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing” due to AI. The Guardian
Meta is giving U.S. employees hit by job cuts 16 weeks of base pay, plus two more weeks for each year at the company, an internal document reviewed by Business Insider shows. The severance deal also covers 18 months of health-care for the workers and their families—three times longer than Meta’s previous COBRA period. COBRA allows U.S. workers to keep their health coverage after leaving their job.
Gale told staff in an internal meeting last month that morale was low and said the company was working to make a “shitty” situation into “the best version possible,” according to Business Insider. Meta had warned employees about layoffs on April 23, leaving cuts overhanging for weeks. Business Insider
Meta is under both financial and competitive pressure as it goes after OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in consumer AI, The Guardian said. The company is also working to embed AI more into employee workflows. Unlike earlier post-pandemic cost cutting, this change links to Meta’s ideas about the future of work.
Risks remain. Reuters said over 1,000 workers have signed a petition against mouse-tracking software used to train Meta’s AI. In its first-quarter update, Meta flagged that legal and regulatory issues tied to youth in the U.S. and EU could hit its business and might lead to a material loss.
Meta started the layoffs from a position of financial strength, with first-quarter revenue at $56.31 billion and net income of $26.77 billion. As of March 31, headcount was 77,986. Wednesday’s cuts are tough to justify as a response to a simple slowdown; some employees now question whether bigger AI budgets and smaller teams will pay off fast enough to make the upheaval worth it.
