Meta Platforms has begun notifying thousands of employees globally about job cuts as part of a comprehensive restructuring initiative. According to reports from Bloomberg, the company announced plans to cut approximately 8,000 roles globally as part of restructuring aimed at reducing costs and driving productivity through AI-led automation. The layoffs are expected to particularly impact Meta's engineering and product teams, with additional cuts potentially coming later in the year. As reported by The Straits Times, the axe started falling in Singapore at 4 am local time on May 20, with employees in Britain, the US and elsewhere receiving notifications early morning on the same day in their respective time zones. The company had roughly 78,000 employees before the exercise began, with the current round affecting about 8,000 people.
Meta started the notification process by contacting employees in its Asian hub Singapore, with employees receiving emails at 4 am local time. As reported by Bloomberg, European and US-based staff are expected to receive notifications early in their respective time zones. The company currently employs just under 80,000 people globally, ahead of these reassignments and layoffs. Additionally, 7,000 workers have been reassigned to newly formed teams focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents. According to The Straits Times, staff are being encouraged to work from home while the company implements these changes. On the day the layoffs began, employees in several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, were instructed to work from home instead of coming to the office, with no company-wide meetings or public announcements about the job cuts.
In an internal memo circulated on May 18, Meta's Head of People Janelle Gale outlined the company's strategic shift toward flatter organizational structures. According to the memo reviewed by Bloomberg News, Gale stated that organizations can now operate with smaller teams that move faster and have more accountability. "We're now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership," Gale said in the memo. The restructuring follows Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to making AI the company's top priority, with Meta committing more than $100 billion to capital expenditures toward artificial intelligence. As reported by Bloomberg, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company's top priority, committing all resources to keeping pace with rivals like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and OpenAI. The company is also reducing managerial layers, with engineering and product roles expected to bear the brunt of the cuts.
The restructuring has generated significant employee frustration and anxiety, with more than 1,000 employees signing a petition demanding that Meta refrain from collecting device data for AI training. As reported by Bloomberg, former Meta employees have taken to social media platforms to express concerns about the impact on work and morale. The petition specifically addresses concerns about collecting granular data such as keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen content for AI training purposes. Before Meta announced layoffs affecting nearly 10 per cent of its global workforce this week, the company had reportedly been monitoring employee activity through an internal tracking tool. According to reports, the system recorded mouse movements and keystrokes on work devices to help generate training data for Meta's artificial intelligence models, with the company believing that observing experienced engineers at work could provide better-quality AI training data than other available methods. These changes have left Meta employees both frustrated and anxious about the company's direction and the impact on their work environment.
Meta's aggressive AI spending has raised concerns among investors who worry about the potential return on investment. According to Bloomberg, analysts at Evercore estimate the layoffs will generate only about $3 billion in savings, representing a small portion of Meta's projected capital expenditures this year, which could reach $145 billion. The company anticipates spending hundreds of billions more on AI infrastructure before the end of the decade, highlighting the significant financial commitment to AI development. While Meta has framed the layoffs as an opportunity to "offset" the cost of some of its major AI investments, the savings generated remain a small fraction of the company's total AI spending commitment. Meta has said it plans to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion this year, with AI as the central focus, as reported by The Straits Times.
