Meta begins laying off 8,000 employees amid A.I. transformation

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last month, employees at Meta have been on edge.

In April, they were told that 8,000 of them, or 10% of the workforce, would be laid off on May 20 as Meta remade itself for the artificial intelligence era. On Monday, they learned that another 7,000 employees would be reassigned to new AI initiatives.

The ax started to fall in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time Wednesday emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere will be notified early Wednesday morning in their respective time zones.

Meta’s offices were set to be mostly empty Wednesday after Janelle Gale, the company’s head of human resources, told employees this week that they should work from home. On the office walls, some workers had hung up flyers sharing a petition to stop Meta’s new program to track their data for AI training, eight employees said. Some workers scavenged the offices for free snacks and laptop chargers Monday in case they no longer had jobs by the end of the week, said the employees, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.

The turmoil at Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — offers an up-close look of layoffs in the AI age. Last week, the networking giant Cisco said it would eliminate 4,000 jobs as it shifted more resources to AI. Microsoft, Block and Coinbase recently announced layoffs or buyouts because of the powerful technology.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has staked his company on AI. Last month, Meta said it would spend between $125 billion and $145 billion — more than double what it spent in 2025 — this year, much of it on AI.

But the company’s transformation from a social networking firm to an AI-first entity has been far from smooth. Employees have said the embrace of AI has led to anger and anxiety across Meta’s 78,000 person workforce, according to 13 current and former employees.

Ahead of the layoffs, hundreds of employees in New York planned to gather for drinks Tuesday to “commiserate or celebrate, pick your poison,” according to a copy of an invitation seen by The New York Times. The title of the event: “Never a dull moment [salute emoji].”

More than 1,000 employees have signed the petition to stop the AI data tracking program, while others have rallied around internal posts critiquing top leadership. But as Zuckerberg pushes forward with AI, employees are wrestling with how, or whether, they can do anything to change course.

“AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion. It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Mack Ward, a software engineer at Meta, wrote in a post to employees this month, which was liked by more than 2,000 people, encouraging them to sign the petition. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”

Executives have been mostly silent about the frustrations, but Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, addressed some concerns in a question-and-answer session last week.

There are “a tremendous number of employees feeling anxieties about their futures,” Bosworth said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by the Times. “It’s all bad. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat that.”

This month, Meta began enlisting hundreds of employees to work for a new team led by Maher Saba, a vice president of engineering, called Applied AI and Engineering, five of the employees said. Some workers began referring to the effort as a “Draft.”

Saba’s new team, which has around 2,000 employees, will use the data gathered by the employee tracking program to create AI tools, four employees said. It will have fewer layers of management than other parts of Meta, with around 50 workers reporting to each manager. Those who joined the group would be safe from the layoffs, the company said.

In an email to managers this month about the new AI team, Meta instructed them to emphasize to employees that it was “a high priority initiative, directly from Mark.”

Participation was not optional, the message said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.