Parent company of Facebook and Instagram will lay off about 10% of its global workforce, or about 8,000 employees
Meta META.O intends to carry out a first wave of mass layoffs on May 20th. A cFacebook and Instagram parent company will lay off around 10% of its global workforceor about 8,000 employees, in this initial round, one of the sources said. Meta employed around 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest record
The company is planning more cuts in the second half of the year, the three sources said, although details, including the date and size, have not yet been finalized. Reuters reported last month that the company was planning to lay off 20% or more of its global workforce. Meta did not comment on the matter this Friday.
The company is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI, as it seeks to drastically reshape the group’s internal workings around technologyreflecting a broader pattern among top U.S. companies this year, especially in the technology sector.
Meta’s mass layoffs this year will be the social media giant’s most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the “year of efficiency” when it eliminated about 21,000 workers. At that time, Meta shares were in free fall and the company was struggling to correct Covid-era growth assumptions that ultimately proved unsustainable.
This time, the company is in a more comfortable financial position, but executives envision a future with fewer layers of management and greater efficiency provided by the use of AI tools.
In recent weeks, Meta has reorganized teams within its Reality Labs division and moved engineers across the company into a new “applied AI” organization tasked with accelerating the development of AI agents that can program software and perform complex tasks autonomously. One of the sources said some employees would also be transferred to Meta Small Business, a unit created last month, as part of the restructuring.
