Following a major workforce reduction, Meta's CEO has signaled a pause in company-wide layoffs for the remainder of the year.
On May 20, Meta initiated its largest organizational restructuring to date, involving approximately 8,000 job cuts and the cancellation of around 6,000 open positions, impacting nearly 14,000 roles in total. Concurrently, in an internal memo, CEO Mark Zuckerberg assured employees that no further "company-level" layoffs are expected this year.
According to the memo obtained by the Financial Times, Zuckerberg stated, "I want to be clear that we do not anticipate any other company-wide layoffs this year." He also acknowledged that the company's internal communication "has not met our own standards" and expressed a desire to improve in this area.
However, this commitment leaves room for adjustments. The report notes that Zuckerberg's statement does not preclude the possibility of layoffs targeting specific teams. In other words, localized restructuring beyond the "company-wide" level remains an option.
The notifications were sent out in three waves, timed for 4 a.m. in each region, covering different global time zones sequentially from Asia-Pacific to Europe and then the Americas.
Employees in North America were instructed to work from home on the day and learned of their employment status via email in the early morning. One employee described the preceding period as a state of "suspense," waiting to learn the fate of their position.
These layoffs affect roughly 10% of Meta's total workforce of approximately 78,000 employees.
The other side of this workforce adjustment is a large-scale strategic reallocation.
It is reported that Meta has reassigned over 7,000 employees to several newly established AI divisions. These include the Applied AI Engineering (AAI) group, the Agent Transformation Accelerator, Central Analytics, and a newly formed enterprise solutions team.
In the memo, Meta's head of Human Resources, Janelle Gale, stated that productivity gains from AI have enabled the company to redeploy these employees to more strategically valuable roles. Leadership across departments has incorporated "AI-native design principles" into the new organizational structure.
Simultaneously, management layers will be significantly compressed company-wide. Gale wrote, "We've now reached a stage where many teams can operate with a flatter structure, moving faster and taking on more ownership in smaller pods/cohorts." Some teams within Meta's Reality Labs have already begun restructuring into smaller pod architectures.
The central logic behind this restructuring is AI.
Zuckerberg is betting billions on what he calls "personal superintelligence," including massive data center construction and hiring top AI researchers with high salaries. One goal is to catch up with competitors like Alphabet and OpenAI. Meta's Llama 4 model, released last year, was considered to lag behind rivals.
The latest model, Muse Spark, launched last month, received relatively positive market feedback but still trails competitors in some capabilities.
On the product front, beyond its existing AI chatbot, Meta is developing a highly personalized AI assistant to handle daily tasks for billions of users. It is also creating photorealistic 3D digital humans capable of real-time interaction, with the first version being a digital clone of Zuckerberg himself.
How large is the financial commitment? In its April earnings report, Meta disclosed that capital expenditures for 2026 are expected to nearly double, reaching between $125 billion and $145 billion.
Zuckerberg is confident that AI technology can help streamline the workforce, particularly in automating programming and engineering tasks.
News of the layoffs was leaked over a month ago, creating sustained tension within the company.
Another point of friction is monitoring. Meta plans to install tracking software on employee devices to record mouse movements, clicks, keyboard inputs, and screen content for training AI models. Employees reportedly cannot opt out of this.
As of May 20, over 1,500 employees had signed a petition urging Meta not to use "employee 'computer usage' data" for training AI models. Several current employees told Business Insider that overall company morale is noticeably strained.
In the memo, Zuckerberg expressed "gratitude" to the affected employees and described the current period as "the most dynamic I've seen in the industry."
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