Meta Platforms, Inc. (META.US) is notifying thousands of employees of layoffs as part of a restructuring effort to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and increase investment in artificial intelligence (AI). The company began sending termination notices to employees worldwide on Wednesday morning, with staff at its Asian hub in Singapore being the first to receive emails around 4 a.m. local time. According to an internal memo, employees in Europe and the United States are also expected to receive notifications early in their respective time zones.
Informed sources indicate this round of layoffs is anticipated to particularly affect Meta's engineering and product teams, with further workforce reductions possible later this year. On Monday, Meta released an internal memo to employees formally disclosing the significant layoffs and organizational restructuring planned for this week. The memo outlines that Meta will officially lay off approximately 10% of its global workforce on Wednesday, May 20 (local time), with a larger, more extensive round of layoffs expected later in the year.
Meta's financial reports show the company had about 78,000 employees as of the end of March, meaning the 10% cut translates to roughly 7,800 jobs. In a memo to employees dated April 23 (local time), Meta stated its plan to reduce its workforce by 10% to improve efficiency and offset the company's substantial expenditures on artificial intelligence. That memo also mentioned the plan would be implemented on May 20.
Beyond direct layoffs, Meta is undergoing a transformative internal organizational adjustment, significantly reducing management positions to implement a flatter corporate structure. In the memo, Meta's Chief Human Resources Officer, Janelle Gale, noted that many department leaders have incorporated "AI-native design principles" while designing the new structure. Moving forward, the company will rely on leaner, more autonomous small-team models to pursue faster response times.
In this restructuring, described as a "comprehensive shift towards AI," Meta also plans to reassign up to 7,000 employees to new projects related to AI workflows, with some transfers already underway. Combining layoffs and reassignments, this restructuring will directly impact approximately 20% of Meta's workforce. Additionally, the company has closed another 6,000 open positions.
**Surging AI Capital Expenditures, Human Costs Take a Backseat**
On April 29, Meta reported first-quarter revenue of $56.31 billion, a 33% year-over-year increase, with advertising revenue rising 33% to $55.02 billion. Operating profit was $22.87 billion, up 30% from the prior year. The company forecast second-quarter revenue between $58 billion and $61 billion.
Concurrently, Meta raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure forecast to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion, increasing both the upper and lower bounds of the range by $10 billion. In its earnings report, Meta stated the increased capex outlook is primarily due to anticipated higher component costs this year, along with increased data center costs to support future capacity.
Despite significant revenue growth bolstered by AI-driven targeted advertising effectiveness, the company has chosen to continue streamlining its workforce to "offset other investments." In the memo, Gale framed the layoffs as an action to "enhance the company's efficiency," stating directly it was to "offset other investments we are making."
It is worth noting this is not Meta's first large-scale workforce reduction. Since laying off approximately 11,000 employees in November 2022, Meta has conducted multiple rounds of cuts. This latest action, involving around 8,000 people, is the largest adjustment since the "Year of Efficiency" in 2023.
Meta is not an isolated case. During the same period, Microsoft introduced its first-ever voluntary employee departure program in the company's 51-year history, targeting U.S. employees whose combined age and years of service total 70 or more. Approximately 7% of its U.S. workforce meets the criteria, potentially affecting around 9,000 employees. Previously, Microsoft had already laid off over 15,000 employees in 2025. Meanwhile, its subsidiary LinkedIn announced another round of layoffs affecting about 5% of its staff, or nearly 900 people, impacting engineering, product, and marketing teams, despite the company posting a 12% year-over-year revenue increase in its latest quarter.
Amazon.com's AI transformation pace is more aggressive. Since the beginning of 2025, Amazon has cumulatively laid off more than 30,000 corporate employees, with cuts mainly concentrated in non-core business units, leaving frontline positions in e-commerce fulfillment and AWS cloud services largely unaffected. Concurrent with the layoffs, Amazon mandated that employees follow an "AI-first" principle in nearly all workflows, including coding, product design, and supply chain analysis. The company also plans to invest approximately $200 billion in building AI infrastructure by 2026. However, this forceful push has sparked internal feedback—according to employee reports, the still-immature AI tools have actually increased the workload of manual error correction.
According to statistics from Layoffs.fyi, global tech industry layoffs have exceeded 103,000 year-to-date in 2026, approaching the approximately 124,000 figure for the entirety of 2025. In the first-quarter 2026 tech industry wave of layoffs, the accelerated shift from human labor to AI-driven automation, driven by productivity tool impacts and Wall Street pressure, has become an irreversible structural trend.
Comments