Approximately 8,000 employees, a full ten percent of the entire company, lost their jobs in the largest wave of layoffs Meta has experienced in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg wants to rebuild from the ground up the company that has connected us through Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for twenty years. Now he wants to rebuild it around artificial intelligence, whatever the cost.
News of the planned layoffs came in April. At the time, Meta told employees that the company would lay off a tenth of its workforce while also eliminating more than 6,000 open positions that would never be filled. So people knew what was coming. They just did not know who it would affect. The atmosphere in the offices grew tense. According to thirteen current and former employees, a mixture of anger and anxiety spread throughout the company.
On Wednesday morning, Zuckerberg sent employees an internal message. He thanked those leaving for their work and described artificial intelligence as “the most significant technology of our lifetimes.” He also promised that the company was not planning any further company-wide layoffs this year.
Another 7,000 people reassigned
Alongside the layoffs, Meta also reassigned another 7,000 employees to newly created teams focused on artificial intelligence. Some are joining a team building cloud infrastructure for AI, while others are working on an internal AI agent code-named Hatch. A similar reassignment took place in April, when the company moved more than a thousand engineers to a new data-labeling team called Applied AI. At first, the company presented it as voluntary. Then came an internal message: “The transfers are not voluntary.”
The layoffs and reassignments are only part of the new reorganization. Meta is also taking direct reports away from managers and pushing them back into roles where they are expected to do the work themselves, rather than merely manage others. Zuckerberg wants fewer leadership positions and more hands-on work.
According to employees, the new organizational structure reveals a shift by senior leadership toward micro-authoritarianism. Instead of trusting employees, the company has changed its approach. Meta was historically known for both its generosity and its freedom. High salaries, free food, and the ability to choose what you wanted to work on. Since the first layoffs in 2022, however, the company culture has gradually changed. Benefits are disappearing, and uncertainty is growing.
Tracking mouse movements, keystrokes, and every click
It was not only the layoffs that upset employees. Meta launched an internal monitoring tool called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), which records mouse movements, keystrokes, the opening and closing of laptops, and everything employees copy to the clipboard. The company uses all this data to train its own AI models. A Meta spokesperson explained it this way: “If we are building AI agents intended to help people with common computer tasks, we need real examples of how people use computers.” But these assurances did little to reassure employees.
Last week, a group of employees began distributing flyers around Meta’s U.S. offices with questions such as: “Do you want Meta to stop collecting your workplace data to train AI models?” More than 500 employees signed the petition. An employee from the data department who wished to remain anonymous described it as “the first time in more than a year that Meta employees have united against the company’s leadership”. They added: “There is an extreme climate of fear at Meta.”
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, a group of Meta employees is discussing the formation of a union with United Tech and Allied Workers.
Billions for AI, thousands laid off
Behind it all is Zuckerberg’s desire to pursue artificial intelligence on an unprecedented scale. Meta plans to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion this year, roughly twice what it spent in 2025. The money is going primarily toward data centers, Nvidia graphics cards, proprietary chips, and infrastructure for AI models.
At the same time, the company is performing extremely well financially. It reported record revenue in the first quarter of this year. The layoffs are therefore not driven by necessity, but by a clear tactical decision: to free up resources for AI and restructure the company so that it can compete more quickly with companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, whose AI products are currently ahead.
In January, Zuckerberg said that he wanted to create “superintelligence” and deliver it to billions of people. Last month, Meta introduced its new AI model, Muse Spark, the first to emerge from the newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs division.
But Meta is not the only company cutting jobs. Networking giant Cisco announced last week that it was eliminating 4,000 positions as it shifts resources to AI. Microsoft, Block, and Coinbase have also recently announced layoffs or voluntary departures. It appears that, in recent years, tech workers have helped build the tools that are now replacing them.
Sources: theguardian.com, wsj.com, and nytimes.com
