Meta will eliminate 8,000 positions across its global workforce, a reduction of 10%, with the first termination notices going out Wednesday morning.
The company plans to roll out the cuts in three separate waves, beginning at 4am local time for employees impacted by the decision. Teams already hit include the integrity unit responsible for moderating harmful content and hate speech, along with cybersecurity personnel and the content design division. US-based workers will receive 16 weeks of severance plus two additional weeks for each year of tenure.
Meanwhile, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is simultaneously moving 7,000 existing employees into roles tied to artificial intelligence workflows. Hiring plans for roughly 6,000 open positions have also been scrapped.
These moves arrive as internal frustration mounts over a worker AI-tracking programme designed to train Meta’s own models. The Wall Street Journal reports that over 1,500 staffers signed a petition urging the company to stop collecting their data. One policy employee told Wired that morale has cratered because the US workforce is “being used to train the AI models that will replace them.”
Compensation concerns compound the tension. Annual raises have shrunk, and median total pay dropped by nearly $30,000.
Mark Zuckerberg, ranked the world’s sixth-richest person by Bloomberg, shows no hesitation in funnelling capital toward AI development. The company forecasts capital expenditures between $125 billion and $145 billion this year, more than double its 2025 figure. During an April earnings call, Zuckerberg framed the investment as a wager that people will matter more in the future.
A Goldman Sachs survey indicates AI-related layoffs now average over 16,000 payroll cuts monthly. Cisco recently announced roughly 4,000 job reductions as part of the same industry-wide shift. Meta shares traded up 0.1% at midday.
