8,000 Meta employees are waking up to an email saying they've been laid off

Notifications went out Wednesday morning starting in Asia, with U.S. employees expected to hear during their morning

By Cris Tolomia2 min readUpdated May 20, 2026

CFOTO / Getty Images

Meta $META began notifying roughly 8,000 employees Wednesday that they are being laid off, the first wave of a major restructuring the company has framed as necessary to fund its push into artificial intelligence. Singapore-based workers were the first to learn their fate, with layoff emails arriving at 4 a.m. local time, according to Bloomberg. Employees in the U.K. and the U.S. were slated to be informed as their own mornings began. Meta asked North American employees to work from home Wednesday.

The cuts amount to about 10% of the company's workforce. Meta had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March. Separate from the cuts, Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale announced that upward of 7,000 workers will be redirected into newly created AI-focused teams, among them Applied AI Engineering, Agent Transformation Accelerator XFN, and Central Analytics. Taken together, the departures and role changes represent a significant reshuffling — affecting something close to 20 percent of everyone on Meta's payroll.

Gale also said that managerial layers are being reduced across the company. In a memo reported by Bloomberg, Gale wrote: "We're now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership."

U.S. workers losing their jobs are reportedly being offered a base severance of 16 weeks' pay, with an additional two weeks added for every full year they have been continuously employed at the company. Health insurance will be extended to cover both employees and their dependents for a period of 18 months. Packages for employees outside the U.S. will vary by country.

When Meta first disclosed the upcoming reductions in late April, an internal memo cast them as a way to sharpen the company's operations and free up resources for other spending priorities. The May round marks a shift from earlier, more targeted reductions — 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. The current restructuring is the largest companywide round of cuts since CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2022 — 2023 "Year of Efficiency" campaign, which eliminated roughly 21,000 positions.

Under Zuckerberg, AI has become the lens through which every major decision at the company is made. Meta's projected capital expenditures for 2026 run from $125 billion to $145 billion, a figure that represents more than twice its 2025 outlay. People with knowledge of the situation, who were not authorized to speak publicly, told Bloomberg that engineering and product divisions are bearing a disproportionate share of the reductions. Meta leaders have told staff that further job cuts beyond this round are possible later in the year, according to Business Insider, though no dates or scope for those reductions have been set.

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