Meta Plans to Cut 8,000 Jobs on May 20 in Third Major Layoff This Year

Meta told employees Thursday it will cut 10% of its workforce on May 20, eliminating roughly 8,000 jobs and freezing 6,000 open roles as it redirects billions into artificial intelligence.

Chief People Officer Janelle Gale delivered the news in an internal memo obtained by multiple outlets, stating the cuts would help Meta "run the company more efficiently" and "offset the other investments we're making." Those investments include up to $135 billion in AI capital expenditures this year alone.

Affected U.S. employees will receive 16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks for every year served, along with 18 months of COBRA health coverage.

Notifications go out May 20 via work and personal email. The layoffs hit a company that employed roughly 79,000 people at the start of 2026 and represent Meta's third major workforce reduction this year. In January, Meta cut 1,500 roles in Reality Labs to reallocate resources toward AI.

Another smaller round followed in March. But the efficiency push has a second act that few companies can replicate.

This week, Meta disclosed its Model Capability Initiative (MCI), a program within Meta Superintelligence Labs that records mouse movements, click locations, keystrokes and intermittent screenshots from U.S. employees' work computers. The goal is not performance management but AI training, teaching models how humans actually handle dropdown menus and use keyboard shortcuts.

Forbes reported that MCI turns Meta's tens of thousands of U.S. knowledge workers into a proprietary training data pipeline for enterprise AI agents.

Rivals like Microsoft and Salesforce sit on similar data inside customer environments but cannot legally use it without breaching contracts. OpenAI lacks workforce scale.

Google and Apple face antitrust constraints.

Meta faces none of those restrictions.

U.S. federal law places no limit on monitoring employees on company devices, giving Meta what Forbes called "the only hyperscaler who can pay the price." The timing matters: Meta Superintelligence Labs launched Muse Spark earlier this month, a multimodal model powering Meta's AI assistant across perception, reasoning and agentic tasks.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors in January he expects "a major AI acceleration" through 2026. The layoffs fund that acceleration while MCI supplies the training fuel to get there.

Meta's stock fell $3.73 on Thursday to close at $659.15 as markets absorbed the news.