Meta plans to cut about 10% of its global workforcefrom May, with around 8,000 jobs expected to go in an initial wave of layoffs as Mark Zuckerberg pushes the company deeper into artificial intelligence, according to people quoted byReuters. The Facebook and Instagram owner is said to be preparing the first round of job cuts for 20 May, with further reductions under consideration for later in the year as it reshapes its business around AI.
The news came after a period in which Meta had already been through one of the most aggressive slimming-down exercises in Silicon Valley. In late 2022 and early 2023,the company shed about 21,000 rolesin what Zuckerberg branded Meta's 'year of efficiency', a restructuring driven by a falling share price and the realisation that it had over-hired during the Covid boom. This time, there is no such crisis: Meta is profitable, growing, and still cutting.
For context,Meta ended last year with nearly 79,000 employees worldwide, according to its most recent filing. Trimming 8,000 roles in the first round alone would be its largest cull since that earlier restructuring phase, signalling that the 'year of efficiency' is being treated less as a one-off and more as a long-term operating principle.
Executives have not publicly confirmed the new layoff plans. The details reported so far rest on unnamed sources cited byReuters, who say the first phase begins on 20 May, with additional rounds being weighed for the second half of the year. Those later cuts have not been finalised and could shift in timing and scale. The same sources suggest the leadership is watching one thing above all: how quickly AI capabilities advance and can be deployed inside the company.
It is hard to miss the backdrop. Zuckerberg has turned Meta into one of the most aggressive spenders on artificial intelligence infrastructure, committing what the report describes as 'hundreds of billions of dollars' to data centres, custom chips and software. Meta is not alone.Amazon has cut about 30,000 white-collar jobs in recent months, around 10% of its corporate workforce, while fintech company Block axed nearly half its staff in February. In both cases, leaders explicitly linked those decisions to efficiency gains made possible by AI tools.
The broader tech sector has been quietly bleeding jobs even as stock prices rebound.Layoffs.fyi, which tracks industry cuts, puts this year's running total at 73,212 tech workers laid off, against 153,000 in all of 2024. That figure is not an official government tally, but it has become a widely cited barometer of sentiment in an industry that once promised endless growth.
Meta's current position in that landscape looks oddly contradictory. The company reportedly generatedmore than $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit in 2024even while ploughing money into AI. Its shares are up 3.68% so far this year, though still short of last summer's peak. In other words, Meta is not cutting because it is bleeding. It is cutting because, like its peers, it believes it can do more with fewer people and more machines.
Inside the company, the shift is already visible. Teams in Reality Labs, the division responsible for virtual and augmented reality projects, have been reorganised. Engineers are being moved into a new 'Applied AI' unit tasked with building AI agents that can code and perform complex tasks autonomously. That kind of language tends to sound abstract until you remember that 'autonomous' usually means 'doing work a human engineer used to do'.
Some staff are expected to be reassigned rather than laid off, including to Meta Small Business, a unit created last month as part of the ongoing restructuring. Still, with a 10% reduction on the table, it is clear that redeployment will not catch everyone. For employees who survived the last 'year of efficiency,' the prospect of another restructuring so soon will feel less like a strategy and more like a recurring weather pattern.
There is a certain blunt logic to Meta's approach. AI systems are good at pattern recognition, code generation, and routine optimisation. Those also happen to be the kinds of tasks done by large swathes of corporate staff, from mid-level engineers to operations and support teams. If the tools work as advertised, a smaller, AI-augmented workforce can indeed push out new products and maintain global platforms at lower cost. Shareholders tend to approve of that story.
Source: International Business Times UK
