On February 19, 2026, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg left federal court in downtown Los Angeles after defending the company in a landmark social media addiction trial.
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Meta plans to lay off 10% of its workforce (approximately 8,000 people) as it continues to ramp up its investment in artificial intelligence.
The layoffs will begin May 20, and the company will reverse plans to hire people to fill 6,000 open positions, according to a Thursday memo to employees. Bloomberg first reported on the layoffs.
Meta’s latest layoffs follow several smaller cuts that the company said were necessary to improve efficiency while focusing on generative AI, which has lagged behind OpenAI. google And humanity.
CNBC reported in January that Meta laid off about 10% of its employees working on Metaverse-related projects. At the time, about 1,000 people in the company’s Reality Labs division were laid off.
Another round of layoffs began in March, affecting hundreds of employees across various departments, including Facebook, Reality Labs, global operations, and sales. Meta also announced last month that it would move away from the third-party vendors and contractors that have traditionally handled its content moderation work and instead rely on a variety of AI technologies.
Layoffs are accelerating across the tech industry as companies reckon with the AI boom. Microsoft on Thursday confirmed it will offer voluntary buyouts to some U.S. employees, a first for the 51-year-old software giant. About 7% of U.S. employees will be affected, said a person familiar with the plan, who asked not to be identified because the numbers have not been made public.
In January, Amazon announced plans to cut about 16,000 corporate jobs, marking its second mass layoff since October of last year.
Meta said in its latest annual report in January that it had 78,865 employees globally as of Dec. 31, down from 86,482 at the end of 2022 due to a wave of hiring across the tech industry following the coronavirus pandemic. The company announced in its 2021 annual report that as of December 31, 2020, the number of employees worldwide reached 58,604.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest effort is to strengthen his company’s position in AI. Earlier this month, Meta debuted its first major artificial intelligence model since hiring Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang for a big deal in June.
This week, Meta revealed to its employees that it is using a new employee tracking tool called the Model Capability Initiative. It is intended to retrieve data from employees using their work computers. A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that data such as employee keystrokes and mouse clicks is needed to train the AI agent.
Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter results on Wednesday, along with fellow tech giants Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.
Meta stock fell 2.4% on Thursday and is now roughly flat year-to-date.
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