4 am layoff email: Meta starts alerting 8,000 employees about job cuts, reassigns 7,000 to new AI-powered teams
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has begun notifying thousands of employees around the world that they are being laid off.
This latest round of layoffs is expected to specifically impact Meta’s engineering and product teams, and additional layoffs may occur later in the year. Bloomberg It was reported, citing people familiar with the company’s plans.
The company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, announced that it plans to lay off approximately 8,000 positions worldwide as part of a restructuring aimed at reducing costs and increasing productivity through artificial intelligence-supported automation.
The announcement comes after Meta committed over $100 billion in capital spending on artificial intelligence (AI). Meta reported to staff the other day that 7,000 workers had been reassigned to newly created teams focused on AI initiatives, including products and reps.
It starts with Singapore
Meta started by notifying employees at its Asian headquarters in Singapore. Employees in Singapore reportedly received the email at 4 a.m. local time.
European and US-based staff are also expected to hear early in their respective time zones, according to an internal memo.
Meanwhile, staff are encouraged to work from home. Before reappointments and layoffs, Meta had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March.
What Meta said
In a note reviewed by Bloomberg NewsJanelle Gale, Meta’s Chief People Officer, said organizations can now work faster and with smaller teams with more responsibility.
“We are now at the stage where many organizations can operate with a flatter structure, with smaller division/group teams that can move faster and take more ownership. We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding,” the statement said.
The restructuring comes after Zuckerberg made artificial intelligence a top priority for the company and devoted much of Meta’s resources to it to keep up with rivals such as Google and OpenAI.
Meta has experienced waves of layoffs in recent years as Zuckerberg has sought to boost productivity, encouraging engineers to use AI agents for coding and outlining plans to track employees’ devices to improve the technology.
Zuckerberg even spent time coding his own AI-powered assistant to handle some CEO tasks, like getting feedback from employees.
Meta employees are fed up
The restructuring left Meta employees both disappointed and concerned. More than a thousand employees have signed a petition addressed to Zuckerberg and other leaders of the company, asking them to refrain from collecting their data from devices, which can be as granular as collecting keystrokes, mouse movements and screen content to train AI.
Others shared on social media how the threat of layoffs affected their work and morale.
A former Meta employee, in a post on social media platform X “My friends are still either waiting in the hope of being laid off or extremely anxious because the job is their lifeline (sic),” he wrote.
Recalling the first wave of layoffs at Meta, he added: “I remember the first big layoffs. The night before was almost like apocalypse, people were filling their bags with free snacks, drinks and chargers.”
Investors are also worried
Meta’s aggressive spending on artificial intelligence has also caused concern among investors who worry that the company’s investment may not ultimately pay off.
Although Meta framed the layoffs as an opportunity to “offset” the cost of some major AI investments, analysts at Evercore estimate the cuts will save only about $3 billion. Bloomberg reported.
That’s just a small portion of Meta’s capital expenditures, which are expected to reach $145 billion this year, and the additional hundreds of billions of dollars the company expects to spend on AI infrastructure before the end of the decade.
