Meta to Lay Off 8,000 Employees Starting End of May

Meta has established the program for a new phase of downsizing its global workforce. According to sources close to the company cited by Reuters, the first round of layoffs will begin on May 20, 2026, affecting about 10% of employees, a figure around 8,000 positions. This operation is part of the start of a broader maneuver that will extend into the second half of the year, with further cuts whose details have not yet been formally defined by the management in Menlo Park.

Unlike the 2022-2023 period, dubbed by Mark Zuckerberg as the year of efficiency, Meta’s current financial context appears solid. With revenue surpassing $200 billion and profits of $60 billion, the choice to reduce the workforce does not respond to a need for economic survival due to stock collapse or post-pandemic forecasting errors. The current push is of a purely technological and structural nature: the goal is to integrate artificial intelligence into internal processes to automate complex tasks and reduce levels of middle management.

Meta sets the timeline for the cuts: it starts on May 20. The focus on artificial intelligence is already changing the internal organization. Meta has recently established a new division called Applied AI, where engineers from various sectors of the company have been transferred. This unit has the specific task of accelerating the development of AI agents capable of operating autonomously, with a particular focus on the automatic generation of software code. At the same time, the Reality Labs division, historically dedicated to the metaverse and XR hardware, has undergone a deep restructuring of its teams.

Part of the staff involved in the organizational changes will be reassigned to Meta Small Business, a newly created unit, but for most of the excess profiles, the pathway ahead is that of definitive exit. Zuckerberg is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, reflecting a strategy that sees the assisted (or replaced) worker by automation as the only sustainable model to maintain competitiveness in the Big Tech sector.

Meta is not the only company implementing a similar policy: Amazon has recently reduced its corporate workforce by about 30,000 positions, while fintech realities like Block have halved their workforce. In all the cases mentioned, corporate management has explicitly linked the cuts to efficiency gains from AI adoption. Data provided by Layoffs.fyi, cited by the source, confirms the extent of the phenomenon: since the beginning of 2026, over 73,000 employees in the tech sector have already lost their jobs globally. For Meta, which had around 79,000 employees at the end of 2025, this new wave represents the definitive transition to a leaner corporate structure, trimming about 10% of its workforce.