Meta is set to begin conducting a round of layoffs potentially impacting 8,000 people, and more are expected later this year as the company continues to push its focus on AI, according to a new report.
CNBC detailed that the layoffs are set to begin on Wednesday and will impact about 10% of the company, which also scrapped plans to fill 6,000 open positions.
Citing a person familiar with the matter, the outlet added that more layoffs could take place in August and in the fall. The company told employees that the decision is "art of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making."
The finance head of the company, Susan Li, said during the earnings call from the first quarter that leadership doesn't "really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future."
The company ended the first quarter of 2026 with 77,900 employees, down 1% on the final quarter of 2025, following earlier rounds of redundancies. Those previous cuts were pitched as a way to streamline operations after heavy spending on the metaverse. This time, executives are far more explicit that jobs are being traded for computing power.
Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "we are seeing more and more examples where one or two people are building something in a week that would have previously taken dozens of people months."
Employees are also protesting against the company's decision to implement a technology tracking their mouse movement and keystrokes to train its AI model, according to a recent report.
Reuters detailed that employees are distributing flyers across U.S. offices encouraging colleagues to sign an online petition against the initiative. "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" the flyer says.
The petition in question claims that "when employees asked what privacy reviews were conducted, including any 'people data reviews' (which are required for processing employee data), no completed privacy reviews were provided."
"The outlined privacy mitigations were vague, and leadership's confidence in them appeared limited - evidenced by the selective opt-out afforded to executives," it adds.
The petition goes on to say that employees are speaking up "because it's expected of us and, more importantly, because it is the right thing to do." "Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace," employees said.
Meta said in late April that the tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will also take snapshots of employees' screens. A Staff AI research scientist sent a memo to the rest of the company, saying the goal is improving the company's AI models in areas where they are struggling to replicate the way in which humans interact with computers.
