Meta starts cutting 8,000 jobs Wednesday as AI spending hits $145 billion and the apology disappears
Three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg told 11,000 laid-off Meta employees he "got this wrong" and took responsibility for overhiring during Covid. This week, as the company begins cutting another 8,000 jobs (roughly 10% of its workforce), the message is different.
No apology this time. Meta told employees the reductions are "all part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making," according to a CNBC report. The layoffs start Wednesday, May 20, with 6,000 open positions also scrapped. The "other investments" are in artificial intelligence. Last month, Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by as much as $10 billion, pushing the total to as high as $145 billion. The company has already cut 1,000 jobs in its Reality Labs unit in January and hundreds more in March, while shifting away from third-party contractors for content moderation.
Internally, the mood is grim. Current and former employees described a sense of dread across the company, with more cuts expected in August and later in 2026, sources told CNBC.
Finance chief Susan Li acknowledged during the first-quarter earnings call that executives "don't really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future."
Former Meta employee Adel Wu described the atmosphere in a viral post on X, recalling workers stuffing bags with free snacks, drinks and chargers before previous layoff rounds. One source called it a "doomsday" moment inside the tech giant.
Affected US employees will receive 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, along with 18 months of paid healthcare coverage, according to an internal memo from chief people officer Janelle Gale. Severance packages outside the US will vary by local labor rules. The cuts come as the broader tech industry sheds jobs at a staggering pace. Nearly 110,000 layoffs have hit 137 tech companies so far in 2026, according to Layoffs.fyi, following roughly 125,000 cuts through all of 2025.
Zuckerberg has framed the downsizing as a natural consequence of AI efficiency, saying smaller teams can now launch products in days instead of months. He insisted AI will not fully replace workers but will help people work faster.
Yet one Meta software engineer who spoke to Storyboard18 said AI coding assistant Claude now handles "a lot of the actual coding" as the company pushes to become "AI native."
Umesh Ramakrishnan, chief strategy officer at executive search firm Kingsley Gate, summed up the new reality: "Now the world understands that jobs are being replaced by machines, and if you're not doing that, shareholders are getting upset."
