8,000 Meta jobs to ax in May as Zuckerberg bets the house on AI

Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to once again take the knife to his creation.

Meta Platforms, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is putting together a global program of layoffs that will see almost one in ten of its employees, about 8,000 people, be shown the door starting next month, with a second wave expected before the end of the year.

The Silicon Valley giant declined to put any figures on the record, but the move will be painfully familiar to the tens of thousands of workers living through Meta’s “performance year” in 2022 and 2023, when some 21,000 roles were cut as the stock price plummeted and the company slumped.

This time around, the reason is very different. Meta is in a strong financial position, but Mr Zuckerberg has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars revamping the business with artificial intelligence. Trade, it seems, is a leaner organization with fewer layers of management and AI-enhanced engineers expected to do the hard work once done by labor forces.

According to Reuters, the first round of cuts is slated for May, with the timing and scope of the latest round yet to be nailed down. Meta employed just 79,000 people at the end of December, according to its most recent filing, meaning the opening salvo alone could wipe out about a tenth of that number.

Meta does not travel alone. Amazon has already laid off 30,000 corporate employees in recent months, equivalent to about 10 percent of its white-collar workforce, and in February fintech group Block let go of nearly half of its workforce, about 4,000 jobs. In both cases, senior management strongly identified the efficiency gains from AI as accountability.

The industry body count proves that. Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs across the tech industry, puts the numbers at 73,212 jobs lost in the first four months of 2026 alone. For all of 2024, the number was 153,000, suggesting that this year’s numbers will eclipse anything seen in this post-pandemic shock.

Within Meta, the restructuring is already underway. Teams within its Reality Labs division have been reorganized in recent weeks, and engineers from across the group have been parachuted into the newly created Applied AI unit. The brief is to accelerate the development of AI agents capable of coding and performing complex tasks without human intervention, the very power, critics will note, that Mr. Zuckerberg seems to believe he can replace many of his employees.

For small and medium-sized British businesses looking across the Atlantic, the signal is telling. With the world’s biggest tech employers openly arguing that productive AI is now capable enough to displace thousands of skilled workers, the pressure on all other businesses to rethink how they plan, hire and release talent only grows.

Whether the efficiency gains will emerge as cleanly as Mr Zuckerberg hopes remains to be seen. Meta’s 2022 cut was followed by a sharp recovery in profits and a rising stock price, reflecting his strong romantic approach in the eyes of Wall Street. A second act in the same equation, however, will test whether AI can really deliver the miracle of productivity promised by its champions, or whether the Meta simply transforms one form of vulnerability into another.