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Meta plans to implement the first round of across-the-board job cuts planned for this year on May 20, with more to follow, three people familiar with the plans told Reuters.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram plans to lay off about 10% of its global workforce, or nearly 8,000 people, in the first phase, one of the people said.
The company is planning further job cuts in the second half of this year, three people said, but details of the cuts, including their schedule and scale, have not yet been determined. Executives may adjust plans as they monitor developments in artificial intelligence capabilities, the sources added. Reuters reported last month that the company plans to lay off more than 20% of its global workforce.
Mehta declined to comment on the timing or scope of the planned cuts.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as he dramatically restructures the company’s internal workings around technology, reflecting a broader pattern this year at major U.S. companies, especially in the technology sector.
Amazon.com Inc. similarly cut 30,000 corporate employees, nearly 10% of its white-collar workforce, in recent months, and the fintech company Bloc cut nearly half its workforce in February.
In both cases, management tied the savings to efficiency gains from artificial intelligence.
Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks technology layoffs around the world, reported that 73,212 employees have lost their jobs so far this year. For all of 2024, this figure was 153,000. Meta’s job cuts this year are the biggest since the company cut about 21,000 jobs from the end of 2022 to early 2023, which the company has dubbed its “Year of Efficiency.” At the time, Meta’s stock price was plummeting and the company struggled to revise its coronavirus-era growth assumptions, which ultimately proved unsustainable.
While the company is in a more comfortable financial position this time around, executives envision a future with fewer layers of management and AI-assisted workforce efficiency.
Meta stock is up 3.68% since the beginning of the year, but is down from its all-time high hit last summer. Last year, the company generated more than $200 billion in revenue and achieved a profit of $60 billion, despite massive spending on artificial intelligence.
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Meta employed about 79,000 people as of Dec. 31, according to its latest filing.
In recent weeks, Meta has reorganized its Reality Labs team, moving engineers across the company to a new “applied AI” organization tasked with accelerating the development of AI agents that can write code and perform complex tasks autonomously.
Some staff will also be transferred to Meta Small Business, a division created last month as part of the restructuring, one of the people said.
Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Jeff Horwitz in San Francisco. Additional reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru. Editing: Kenneth Lee and Matthew Lewis
