Meta $META told employees on Thursday that it will cut about 10% of its workforce, or roughly 8,000 jobs, with layoffs effective May 20, according to multiple reports. Meta will also close about 6,000 open roles it had intended to fill.
Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer, authored an internal memo describing the cuts that was reported by Bloomberg. In it, she cited the company's broader spending priorities: "We're doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making." The company had almost 79,000 employees at the start of the year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poured resources into building out AI capabilities, directing spending toward model development, chatbot products, and the engineering talent to support them. Meta set its 2026 capital expenditure guidance at $115 billion to $135 billion, almost double the $72 billion it spent in 2025. Employees have been encouraged to use AI agents internally for tasks such as writing code.
The early disclosure, Gale explained, was prompted by the fact that information about the cuts had already made its way into press reports before the company was ready to announce. "I know this is unwelcome news and confirming this puts everyone in an uneasy state, but we feel this is the best path forward, given the circumstances," she wrote.
According to the memo, severance for affected workers in the United States will cover 18 months of COBRA health insurance premiums, along with a base pay component of 16 weeks that increases by two weeks for each year of service. Departing employees will have access to job placement assistance and, where applicable, help navigating immigration status. Packages outside the U.S. will vary by country.
The May 20 cuts mark a shift from earlier, more targeted reductions toward a companywide restructuring. Meta cut between 10% and 15% of its Reality Labs workforce in January, shut down several VR game studios, and shed about 700 positions across at least five divisions in March. Engineers from across the company have since been moved into a new Applied AI Engineering division focused on building autonomous coding agents.
The restructuring comes despite a strong financial position. Meta closed out last year with revenue exceeding $200 billion and net profit of $60 billion. CFO Susan Li has cautioned that depreciation and operating costs tied to the data center expansion represent a "significant acceleration in infrastructure expense growth."
The current round of cuts is the largest companywide restructuring since Zuckerberg's 2022–2023 "Year of Efficiency" campaign, during which the company eliminated about 21,000 positions in response to a falling stock price and post-pandemic demand that failed to materialize.
A further round of job cuts is anticipated later in 2026, though Fox Business reported that neither a schedule nor a scale for those reductions has been determined.