In short: Meta will begin companywide layoffs on 20 May, cutting approximately 8,000 employees (10% of its 78,865-person workforce), with additional cuts planned for the second half of 2026. The restructuring, which follows earlier rounds that brought Zuckerberg’s total cuts since 2022 to roughly 25,000, is driven by a reallocation toward AI infrastructure costing $115-135 billion in 2026, with teams reorganised into AI-focused “pods” under new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang’s Superintelligence Labs.
Meta will begin companywide layoffs on 20 May, cutting approximately 8,000 employees, or 10% of its global workforce, according to three people familiar with the plans who spoke to Reuters. Additional cuts are planned for the second half of 2026, though their timing and scope have not been finalised. The May round is the first phase of a restructuring that earlier reports suggested could eventually reach 20% of the company, though a Meta spokesperson called that figure “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”
The layoffs will hit teams across Reality Labs, the Facebook social division, recruiting, sales, and global operations. California WARN Act filings confirm 124 positions at Meta’s Burlingame office effective 22 May and 74 at its Sunnyvale facility effective 29 May. But the bulk of the cuts will be spread across the company’s 78,865-person workforce, which grew 6% last year even as Mark Zuckerberg was publicly declaring that AI would allow Meta to do more with fewer people.
The pattern so far
The May round is not the beginning of Meta’s 2026 workforce reduction. It is the escalation. In January, the company cut roughly 1,000 to 1,500 Reality Labs employees, approximately 10% of that division’s staff, and shut down several VR game studios. Reality Labs’ budget was slashed by 30%. In March, Meta cut another 700 employees across at least five divisions. The May layoffs represent a shift from targeted reductions to a companywide restructuring that touches every major business unit.
Since 2022, Zuckerberg has eliminated roughly 25,000 positions. The first round, 11,000 in November 2022, was framed as correcting pandemic-era over-hiring. The second, 10,000 in early 2023, accompanied what Zuckerberg called the “Year of Efficiency.” In January 2025, another 3,600 were cut in what the company described as performance-based terminations, though some affected employees had received ratings of “at or above expectations.” The May 2026 round is structurally different: it is not about removing underperformers but about reorganising the company around AI.
Where the people are going
The restructuring is being led by two executives who represent Meta’s new priorities. Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO of Scale AI whom Meta hired in June 2025 as Chief AI Officer, runs Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division that debuted its first major model, Muse Spark, earlier this month. Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion to secure Wang’s involvement. Maher Saba, who now heads the new Applied AI Engineering division reporting to CTO Andrew Bosworth, authored an internal memo on 14 April outlining the overhaul. The new division consists of two teams: one focused on interfaces and tooling, and another on task execution, data generation, and evaluations.
Traditional roles are being replaced with new titles: “AI builder,” “AI pod lead,” and “AI org lead.” Roughly 1,000 employees have already been affected by the rebranding, and engineers from across the company are being transferred into the Applied AI organisation. The internal memo stated that the goal was to “drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality” and that Meta was “fundamentally rewiring how we operate.”
The departure that shaped this moment happened earlier. Yann LeCun, Meta’s former Chief AI Scientist, left the company in late 2025 after 12 years, citing disagreements over AI research direction and tensions with Zuckerberg. He called Wang “young and inexperienced,” then went on to found AMI Labs and raise €1.03 billion in what became Europe’s largest-ever seed round, backed by Nvidia, Bezos Expeditions, and Temasek. Meta subsequently cut 600 FAIR researchers and restructured its AI division around Wang’s Superintelligence Labs.
The financial logic
Meta’s 2025 results make the layoffs harder to frame as a response to financial pressure. Revenue reached $201 billion, up 22% year over year. Fourth quarter net income was $22.8 billion, beating analyst expectations. Free cash flow for the year was $43.6 billion. The stock rose nearly 10% after the Q4 earnings report. Bank of America has a price target of $885 and projected $7 to $8 billion in annualised savings from the restructuring.
The pressure is coming from the other side of the balance sheet. Meta’s capital expenditure guidance for 2026 is $115 to $135 billion, nearly double the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025. The money is going to data centres, GPUs, and infrastructure for Llama models and recommendation systems, including a $27 billion joint venture with Nebius for a gigawatt-scale AI data centre campus in Louisiana. CFO Susan Li warned of “significant acceleration in infrastructure expense growth” as depreciation and operating costs from expanded data centres hit the income statement. The layoffs are not about survival. They are about funding the most expensive corporate bet in technology history while maintaining the operating margins that Wall Street expects.
The performance system
Meta has redesigned its performance review system to support the restructuring. Employees are now categorised into four tiers: the top 20%, the middle 70%, a lower 7%, and the bottom 3%. Top performers with “truly exceptional impact” can receive up to 300% of their base bonus. Managers have been asked to mark 15 to 20% of employees as “below expectations,” a larger proportion than previous targets. The system has shifted to reward output over effort, and employees who cannot demonstrate clear business impact are vulnerable regardless of their tenure or prior ratings.
The contrast with executive compensation has not gone unnoticed internally. Meta granted its senior executives stock options worth up to $921 million each, tied to a $9 trillion market capitalisation target by March 2031, in the same period it was laying off hundreds. On Blind, the anonymous professional network, employees have described the workplace as “toxic” and reported a “crisis of trust” around whether cuts are merit-based, particularly after high-performing employees were caught in previous rounds.
The industry pattern
Meta is not an outlier. The tech industry has shed more than 95,000 jobs across 247 layoff events in 2026, an average of 882 per day. Amazon cut 16,000 in January. Oracle eliminated up to 30,000, roughly 18% of its workforce, to fund $156 billion in AI infrastructure. Fifty-five per cent of US hiring managers surveyed expect layoffs this year, with 44% citing AI as a primary driver. The pattern is consistent: companies are reporting record revenues and simultaneously cutting headcount, redirecting the savings into AI infrastructure that they believe will generate more value than the employees it replaces.
Whether that belief is correct will determine whether the current restructuring wave looks prescient or destructive in retrospect. Meta’s Q1 2026 earnings, scheduled for 29 April, will provide the first financial snapshot of a company that is simultaneously spending more than almost any corporation in history and reducing its workforce at a pace not seen since the pandemic correction. Zuckerberg has said 2026 would be a year where “the AI wave accelerates even further on several fronts.” For roughly 8,000 people who will lose their jobs on 20 May, the acceleration is already here.