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Meta $META -1.41% began notifying roughly 8,000 employees Wednesday that they are being laid off, the first wave of a restructuring the company has framed as necessary to fund its push into artificial intelligence. Singapore-based workers were the first to learn their fate, with layoff emails arriving at 4 a.m. local time; colleagues in Britain and the U.S. were slated to be informed as their own mornings began. Meta asked North American employees to work from home Wednesday.
The cuts amount to about 10% of the company's workforce. Meta had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March. Separate from the cuts, Gale announced that upward of 7,000 workers will be redirected into newly created AI-focused teams, among them Applied AI Engineering, Agent Transformation Accelerator XFN, and Central Analytics. Taken together, the departures and role changes represent a significant reshuffling — affecting something close to 20 percent of everyone on Meta's payroll.
Gale also said that managerial layers are being reduced across the company. In the memo, which Bloomberg reviewed, Gale wrote: "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."
