Meta is warning thousands of employees that they will be laid off as part of an already announced restructuring to cut costs as the company accelerates investments in artificial intelligence.
The company began notifying employees around the world on Wednesday morning (20), starting in Asia, where employees received the notice at 4am Singapore time. In the United States, employees must also be informed throughout the morning, according to an internal memo.
In Ireland, Meta has cut around 350 jobs, equivalent to something close to a fifth of the local workforce, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private. A company spokesperson did not comment on specific cuts, but said affected employees and the Irish government have already been officially notified.
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Employees are being told to work from home as the company eliminates around 8,000 jobs worldwide. This new round of layoffs is expected to mainly hit engineering and product teams, and further cuts could still occur throughout the year, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
“Automation companies like Meta are at risk of no longer being desired employers as it becomes clear that they will take the human out of the equation whenever the opportunity arises,” says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioral sciences at the University of Oxford. “This may generate cost savings in the short term, but it threatens long-term growth potential by harming employee well-being and engagement.”
On Monday (18), Meta informed employees that around 7,000 people were also reassigned to newly created teams focused on AI initiatives, including product development and artificial intelligence “agents”. The company, which has committed to spending well over $100 billion on AI capex this year, had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March, before the reshuffles and layoffs.
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“We have reached a point where many areas are now able to operate with a more horizontal structure, with smaller teams, in pods/cohorts, that move faster and with a greater sense of ownership,” wrote Janelle Gale, head of Human Resources at Meta, in an internal statement obtained by Bloomberg News. “We believe this will make us more productive and make work more rewarding.”
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s number one priority, directing resources to keep up with rivals such as Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI. This has been changing the size and profile of Meta’s workforce — and also the way it works. The company has gone through several waves of layoffs in recent years as Zuckerberg pushes for more efficiency. He encourages engineers to use AI agents to help with programming tasks and other activities, has presented plans to track employee device usage to improve technology, and has even written code for an AI assistant that can take over some of his CEO tasks, such as collecting internal feedback.
The changes left many Meta employees frustrated and apprehensive. More than a thousand of them signed a petition addressed to Zuckerberg and other executives, asking the company not to collect data from its devices — at a level as detailed as recording keystrokes, mouse movements and screen content — to train AI systems. Others took to social media to report how the constant risk of dismissal has affected work and team morale.
Meta’s aggressive pace of spending on AI also raises doubts among investors, who fear that this investment will not bring sufficient returns. Although the company presents the layoffs as a way to “offset” part of the cost of large AI projects, analysts at Evercore estimate that the cuts should generate something close to US$3 billion in savings.
It is little compared to the volume of capital investments projected by Meta for this year, which could reach US$ 145 billion, in addition to hundreds of billions of dollars that the company expects to spend on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade.
© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.
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