On May 18, Meta informed all employees via an internal memo about upcoming layoffs: starting May 20, roughly 8,000 staff members — about 10% of its global workforce of 79,000 — will be let go. Additionally, 6,000 job openings previously slated for hiring will be canceled, affecting a total of around 14,000 positions. Further layoffs are expected later this year, though the exact scale and timing remain undetermined. Signed by Chief People Officer Janelle Gale, the memo stated these cuts “are not performance-related” but aim to boost operational efficiency and free up resources for other corporate investments. U.S.-based affected employees will receive 16 weeks’ base pay plus two extra weeks per year of service worked, along with 18 months of health coverage; those on work visas will also get dedicated immigration support.
Meanwhile, Meta is reorganizing its various teams into AI-centric ‘Pods,’ introducing new roles such as ‘AI Builder,’ ‘AI Pod Lead,’ and ‘AI Org Lead’ to transition engineers en masse into its AI-focused divisions. This marks Meta’s third major round of layoffs in 2026: in January, over 1,000 Reality Labs employees were let go and multiple VR game studios shut down; March saw another 700 redundancies across Reality Labs, Facebook Social, Recruiting, Sales, and Global Operations. Collectively, these three waves have eliminated some 9,700 jobs, bringing Meta’s total workforce reductions since 2022 to over 33,000. Contextually, Meta projects its AI infrastructure-related capital expenditures in 2026 to range between $115 billion and $135 billion — a 73% increase over 2025’s $72.2 billion — including construction of the 1-gigawatt AI supercomputing cluster Prometheus in Ohio and the $10 billion Hyperion data center spanning 2,250 acres in Louisiana.