For Meta, this would be its biggest round of job losses since late 2022 and early 2023, when it cut about 21,000 positions during what it called the “year of efficiency”.
At that time, the company was grappling with a steep share-price fall and the collapse of COVID-era growth assumptions that had proved unsustainable.
Meta is now on firmer financial ground, but executives are still pushing for fewer layers of management and greater efficiency from AI-assisted workers.
According to its latest filing, the Menlo Park, California-based company had nearly 79,000 employees as of December 31.
Its shares have risen 3.68% since the start of the year, though they remain below the record high reached last summer.
Last year, Meta generated more than $200 billion in revenue and posted a $60 billion profit despite heavy AI spending.
In recent weeks, the company has reorganised teams in Reality Labs and reassigned engineers from across the business into a new “Applied AI” organisation focused on speeding up the development of AI agents that can write code and carry out complex tasks autonomously.
One source said some employees would also be moved into Meta Small Business, a unit created last month as part of the restructuring.
Reuters