Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta on Wednesday kicked off a major bloodbath with 8,000 layoffs – among the largest in the social media giant’s history – as a disruptive shift toward artificial intelligence continues to roil the tech giant.
Employees were told in April that a 10% reduction of the workforce was coming on May 20, and earlier this week, they were reportedly informed that another 7,000 staffers would be reassigned to AI-focused positions.
Meta’s offices are set to be mostly deserted Wednesday after human resources chief Janelle Gale told North American employees to work from home in an email this week, according to an internal document earlier reported by Reuters.
The companywide purge is taking place in three massive waves, as employees across the world are notified in emails at 4 a.m. local time in their respective regions.
Singapore staffers were the first to receive the doomsday emails.
Meta did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Staffers at the social media giant – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – have been disgruntled ahead of the layoffs.
Some workers hung fliers on the office walls with a petition to stop Meta’s new program to track their data for AI training, while others swiped free snacks and laptop chargers from the building on Monday in case they lost their jobs by the end of the week, the New York Times reported.
In the New York office, hundreds of employees planned to gather for drinks on Tuesday ahead of the layoffs, saying the event was meant to “commiserate or celebrate, pick your poison,” according to a copy of the invitation seen by the outlet.
One Meta employee told the San Francisco Standard ahead of the layoffs that the worker’s office has been in “chaos” as employees fear they’ll be axed.
“I am generally dissatisfied with leadership and angry,” the anonymous employee said. “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job.”
Meta previously said laid-off workers would receive severance packages with at least 16 weeks of base pay and another two weeks for each additional year of employment, along with health care and career support benefits.
In her memo, Gale said the layoffs were an effort to “run the company more efficiently” as it spends big on artificial intelligence.
The tech firm has announced capital expenditures as high as $145 billion this year alone. That’s more than twice the amount it spent in 2025, despite mounting investor jitters over an AI bubble similar to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Meta is expected to slash even more roles later this year, thought the exact timing and scope of those layoffs is unclear.
Zuckerberg cut more than 20,000 jobs across the company in 2022 and 2023 as he has sought to reduce bureaucracy amid the rise of AI.
The new technology has increasingly been named as a leading reason for layoffs, as Microsoft, Block, Coinbase and Cisco all recently announced mass layoffs or buyouts linked to AI.
In the first three months of 2026, the tech sector suffered more than 52,000 layoffs – a 40% jump from the same period last year, with AI cited as a top driving factor, according to reports from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
