Meta Lays Off 8,000 Employees, as A.I. Casualties Mount
Employees have signed petitions against being tracked by A.I. and were trying to figure out who had been let go on Wednesday, as the Silicon Valley giant tries to transform into an A.I.-first company.
For the last month, employees at Meta have been on edge.
In April, they were told that 8,000 of them, or 10 percent of the work force, would be laid off on May 20 as Meta remade itself for the artificial intelligence era. On Monday, they learned that another 7,000 employees would be reassigned to new A.I. initiatives.
On Wednesday, the ax fell. The layoffs began in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere were notified early Wednesday morning in their respective time zones.
Many workers began exchanging somber messages remotely and checked the internal directory to figure out who on their teams was cut. On Meta’s internal forums, hundreds reacted to the layoffs with salad emojis, their way to say “salute.” At least one person who was hired within the past month was laid off, two people with knowledge of the job cuts said.
Meta’s offices were mostly empty on Wednesday after Janelle Gale, the company’s head of human resources, told employees this week that they should work from home. On the office walls, fliers sharing a petition to stop Meta’s new program to track employee data for A.I. training were visible, eight employees said. Some workers scavenged the offices for free snacks and laptop chargers on Monday in case they no longer had jobs by the end of the week, said the employees, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.
The turmoil at Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — offers an up-close look at layoffs in the A.I. age. Job cuts at tech companies in the name of the fast-evolving technology have gathered steam. Tech workers, it is becoming clear, have been creating their own A.I. replacements. Last week, the networking giant Cisco said it would eliminate 4,000 jobs as it shifted more resources to A.I. Microsoft, Block and Coinbase also recently announced layoffs or buyouts because of the technology.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has been vocal about staking his company on A.I. He has said he wants to create “superintelligence,” an advanced A.I. that can act as the ultimate personal assistant. Last month, Meta said it would spend between $125 billion and $145 billion — more than double what it spent in 2025 — this year, much of it on A.I.
But the company’s transformation from a social networking firm to an A.I.-first entity has been far from smooth. Employees have said the embrace of A.I. has led to anger and anxiety across Meta’s 78,000 person work force, according to 13 current and former employees. The frustration was heightened by Meta’s strong financial performance, with the company reporting record revenue last month, leading to questions about why job cuts were needed.
In a note to employees on Wednesday morning, Mr. Zuckerberg said he was grateful to those who were laid off for their work and optimistic about the company’s A.I. efforts. More companywide layoffs were not expected this year, he said.
“Success isn’t a given. A.I. is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “The companies that lead the way will define the next generation.”
Before the cuts, hundreds of employees in New York gathered for drinks on Tuesday night to “commiserate or celebrate, pick your poison,” according to a copy of an invitation seen by The New York Times. The title of the event: “Never a dull moment 🫡.”
More than 1,000 employees have so far signed the petition to stop the A.I. data tracking program, while others have rallied around internal posts critiquing top leadership. But as Mr. Zuckerberg pushes forward with A.I., employees are wrestling with how, or whether, they can do anything to change course.
“A.I. is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion. It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Mack Ward, a software engineer at Meta, wrote in a post to employees this month, which was liked by over 2,000 people, encouraging them to sign the petition. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, addressed some concerns in a question-and-answer session last week. There are “a tremendous number of employees feeling anxieties about their futures,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The Times. “It’s all bad. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat that.”
Executives have taken steps to retain workers they see as key talent. One director-level employee was offered additional equity worth roughly $500,000 to stay, two people familiar with the matter said, a tactic that Meta also used to keep certain employees during its last round of layoffs. Some refused the offers and left, the people said.
Workers who were laid off were given 16 weeks of severance pay, plus an additional two weeks for every year they worked at the company.
This month, Meta began enlisting hundreds of employees to work for a new team led by Maher Saba, a vice president of engineering, called Applied A.I. and Engineering, five of the employees said. Some workers began referring to the effort as a “Draft.”
Mr. Saba’s new team, which so far has around 2,000 employees, will use the data gathered by the employee tracking program to create A.I. tools, four employees said. It will have fewer layers of management than other parts of Meta, with around 50 workers reporting to each manager. Those who joined the group would be safe from the layoffs, the company said.
In an email to managers this month about the new A.I. team, Meta instructed them to emphasize to employees that it was “a high priority initiative, directly from Mark.”
Participation was not optional, the message said.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
Kalley Huang is a Times reporter in San Francisco, covering Apple and the technology industry.
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence
News and Analysis
California’s A.I. Order to Protect Workers: Gov. Gavin Newsom is issuing an executive order to explore an overhaul of labor policies to deal with potential mass job displacement from artificial intelligence.
Fight Over A.I. Profits: Samsung Electronics, a global memory chip supplier, has been a major beneficiary of the A.I boom. It has also become the center of a debate over how to divide its spoils.
Nvidia: The chip maker said its profit in its most recent quarter jumped 211 percent from a year earlier thanks to extreme demand from other big technology companies.
Potential Job Losses: A report by the New York City comptroller argues that the city’s economy will be transformed by artificial intelligence.
Book Quotes Made Up by A.I.: The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged that he had included numerous misattributed or fake quotes after The New York Times asked about them.
Meta: The company told employees in April that it would carry out mass layoffs on May 20, as the Silicon Valley giant tries to transform into an A.I.-first company. It is reassigning 7,000 workers to focus on new initiatives around artificial intelligence.
OpenAI: The maker of the ChatGPT chatbot is preparing to file confidentially for an initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
The Age of A.I.
Humanities Students React: At the University of Central Florida, students erupted with boos during a commencement speech after a real estate executive called artificial intelligence “the next industrial revolution.”
‘Avatar’ Lawsuit: An actress accused the director James Cameron of stealing her likeness to create a character, in a case that reflects an increasing fear among Hollywood performers: losing control of their own faces.
Student Writing: High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.
South Korea’s Seniors: In the world’s fastest aging society, artificial intelligence is being used to make care calls to older adults who live alone and to fight dementia.