Meta begins laying off 8,000 employees amid AI transformation

Employees at Meta have been on edge for the past month.

They were told in April that 8,000 of them, or 10 percent of the workforce, would be laid off on May 20 as Meta retooled for the AI ​​era. On Monday, they learned that an additional 7,000 employees will be reassigned to new AI initiatives.

The ax began to fall in Singapore, where at 4am local time on Wednesday they sent out emails to workers who had been laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere will be notified early Wednesday morning in their respective time zones.

Meta’s offices were expected to be mostly empty on Wednesday after Janelle Gale, the company’s head of human resources, told employees this week that they should work from home. On office walls, some workers posted flyers sharing a petition to stop Meta’s new program from tracking their data for AI training, eight employees said. Some employees searched the offices Monday for free snacks and laptop chargers in case they were out of work by the end of the week, said the employees, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.

The turmoil at Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — offers a close-up look at layoffs in the age of artificial intelligence. Last week, networking giant Cisco said it would cut 4,000 jobs as it shifts more resources to AI Microsoft, Block and Coinbase have recently announced layoffs or buyouts due to the powerful technology.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Bets His Company on AI Last month, Meta said it would spend between $125 billion and $145 billion — more than double what it spent in 2025 — this year, much of it on AI.

However, the company’s transformation from a social networking firm to an AI-first entity has been far from smooth. Employees said the adoption of artificial intelligence has led to anger and anxiety among Meta’s 78,000 employees, according to 13 current and former employees.

Ahead of the layoffs, hundreds of New York City employees planned to gather for drinks on Tuesday to “honor or celebrate, pick your poison,” according to a copy of the invitation seen by The New York Times. Event name: “Never boring 🫡.”

More than 1,000 employees have so far signed a petition to stop the AI ​​data tracking program, while others have rallied around internal posts criticizing senior management. But as Mr. Zuckerberg pushes forward with AI, employees are grappling with how, or whether, they can do anything to change course.

“AI is a freight train, but the future is not certain. It’s not too late to put the brakes on and consider how we, as a society, want to do it,” Mack Ward, a software engineer at Meta, wrote this month in a post to employees that was liked by more than 2,000 people and encouraged them to sign a petition. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ is not what you were hired to do.”

Executives have mostly kept quiet about the frustrations, but Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, addressed some of the concerns in a question-and-answer session last week.

There are “a huge number of employees who feel concerned about their future,” Mr. Bosworth said, according to a transcript of the meeting reviewed by The Times. “It’s all bad. I won’t try to sugarcoat it.”

This month, Meta began recruiting hundreds of employees to work for a new team led by Maher Saba, vice president of engineering, called Applied AI and Engineering, five employees said. Some workers began to refer to the effort as “the draft.”

Mr. Saba’s new team, which so far has about 2,000 employees, will use data collected by the employee tracking program to create AI tools, four employees said. It will have fewer levels of management than other parts of the Meta, with around 50 workers reporting to each manager. Those who joined the group would be safe from layoffs, the company said.

In an email to managers this month about the new AI team, Meta instructed staff to emphasize that this was a “high priority initiative, straight from Mark.”

Participation was not optional, the report said.

Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco. Kitty Bennett contributed research.