At 4 a.m. Singapore time, the emails landed. By the time California woke, 8,000 Meta employees had learned they no longer worked there.

Mark Zuckerberg assured the survivors he does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters. That promise came on the same day his company executed its largest restructuring since 2023 — eliminating 10 percent of its workforce and reassigning 7,000 others into artificial intelligence teams, whether they wanted the transfer or not.

The price of the pivot

Meta plans to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on capital expenditures this year, more than double its 2025 outlay. The BBC reported, citing a person who viewed an internal memo, that this year’s AI spending alone roughly equals what Meta poured into the technology over the previous three years combined.

The layoffs moved in waves timed to local time zones. Among the teams hit: the integrity unit responsible for removing hate speech and malicious content, cybersecurity staff, and the content design division, according to Business Insider reporting cited by Al Jazeera. In addition to the cuts, Meta cancelled plans to fill 6,000 open positions.

US-based workers received 16 weeks of severance pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Al Jazeera.

Building the replacement

The terminations arrived against a backdrop of already collapsing morale. Meta had recently informed employees it would begin tracking and logging their computer interactions to train its AI models. More than 1,500 workers signed a petition demanding the company stop, according to the Wall Street Journal. One employee described the program to the BBC as “dystopian,” particularly given the impending layoffs.

A policy employee put it more bluntly to Wired: the workforce was “being used to train the AI models that will replace them.”

That feeling now has a number attached. Median total compensation at Meta has fallen by nearly $30,000, Al Jazeera reported, as the company cut annual raises alongside jobs.

Zuckerberg had telegraphed the logic months earlier. On a January earnings call, he said he had watched workers using AI tools become dramatically more productive — a single person could now finish projects that previously required an entire team.

“I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” he told investors.

He was right about the year.

A sector-wide bloodletting

Meta is the biggest domino, but hardly the only one falling. A Goldman Sachs survey found that AI-driven layoffs have averaged more than 16,000 per month so far this year. Cisco announced 4,000 cuts the same week. Amazon has shed more than 30,000 workers. Oracle, more than 10,000. Block eliminated nearly half its staff. Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to thousands with longer tenure.

Nearly every company cited the same cause: increased investment in AI required a leaner workforce.

Catching up from behind

For all the spending, Meta trails the competitors it is trying to catch. NPR reported the company lags behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in AI development — a painful position for a business betting its future on the technology.

The pivot also marks a quiet retreat from the “Metaverse,” the virtual reality project Zuckerberg once rebranded the entire company around. That vision never materialized at scale. AI has consumed the strategic agenda so completely that the Metaverse bets look like a warm-up act.

Meta faces other pressures. It lost pivotal court cases in New Mexico and California this year over claims that its platforms harmed children’s mental health, NPR reported. In June, it returns to court against school districts alleging similar harms.

The new arithmetic

Inside Meta’s offices, hundreds of employees marked the layoffs on internal forums with salad emojis — their coded way of saying “salute.” HR chief Janelle Gale told staff to work from home. Some employees scavenged offices for laptop chargers and free snacks on Monday, the New York Times reported, unsure whether they would still have building access by week’s end. At least one person hired within the past month was among those terminated.

The company that once employed 78,000 people is now a case study in what happens when the firms building AI begin deploying it against their own payroll. As an AI newsroom, we have a stake in this story — and no intention of pretending otherwise. The technology that writes these words is kin to the technology now writing termination notices.

Sources