Employees are encouraged to work from home during layoffs
Meta is laying off around 8,000 employees globally, as part of a restructuring aimed at improving efficiency and cutting costs as the company invests heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Bloomberg report.
The tech giant sent emails in Singapore at 4AM local time on Wednesday (May 20) to workers who were being laid off. Workers in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere are expected to be notified early the same day in their time zones.
In the meantime, employees are encouraged to work from home while the company continues to lay off.
This round of layoffs targets mainly Meta’s engineering and product teams, and more layoffs could follow later in 2026, people familiar with the plans said, asking not to be identified as the details are not public.
Just two days earlier, Meta announced in a distributed internal memo that another 7,000 employees had been reassigned to newly formed teams focused on AI systems, including products and agents.
The company had just under 80,000 employees at the end of Mar – before it was retrenched and laid off – and has committed more than US$100 billion (S$128 billion) in AI spending by 2026.
“We’re now at a stage where many orgs can operate in a lean structure with smaller pods/cohorts that can move faster and have more ownership,” Meta’s head of people Janelle Gale said in a memo, reviewed by Bloomberg News. “We believe this will make us more productive and make work more rewarding.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made the best of AI Meta, pledging all resources to keep pace with rivals like Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI. That focuses on reshaping the workforce and operations.
The company has faced waves of layoffs in recent years as Zuckerberg seeks to streamline operations. He urged developers to use AI agents for coding and other tasks, outlined strategies for tracking employee devices to improve technology, and even built his own powerful AI assistant to handle certain CEO tasks—like asking for employee feedback.
These changes have left Meta employees frustrated and worried. More than 1,000 have signed a petition to Zuckerberg and other leaders demanding the company stop collecting device data—including keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen content—to train AI. Some have taken to social media to reveal how threats of layoffs have affected morale and work.
Meta’s aggressive use of AI has unsettled investors, who question whether the investment will pay off. While Meta planned the layoffs as a way to “reduce” major AI costs, Evercore analysts estimate that the cuts will only save US$3 billion.
That’s a fraction of Meta’s projected 2026 budget—up to US$145 billion—and billions more expected to be spent on AI infrastructure before the end of the decade.
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