Meta Platforms began notifying thousands of employees on Wednesday that they are being laid off, Bloomberg reported, starting with the Asian hub in Singapore, where staff received the email at 4 am local time. European and US-based employees were notified early in their own time zones on the same day.
The cuts implement the 10%-workforce-reduction commitment Meta first announced on 23 April as part of what chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been framing as the company’s efficiency-and-AI restructuring.
The numbers Meta committed to in April are the ones playing out this week. Around 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of the headcount, are losing their jobs.
An additional 6,000 open positions that the company had been planning to fill will be left unfilled. The two figures together are the part Wall Street has been pricing into Meta’s operating-leverage forecast for the second half of the year; CNBC’s April coverage framed the 10% cut against $72.2bn of 2025 capex and the at-least-$115bn capex guidance for 2026, both numbers tied directly to AI infrastructure.
What gives the cuts their specifically operational character is the redeployment that came alongside them. Meta moved 7,000 employees into AI-focused roles on Monday, in Chief People Officer Janelle Gale’s memo, before the 8,000-job cut started landing on Wednesday.
