Meta Cuts 8,000 Jobs, AI to Blame

Meta announced layoffs for about 8,000 employees which works out to about 10% of the company’s workforce. Employees had been told a month ago that this was coming.

For the last month, employees at Meta have been on edge.

In April, they were told that 8,000 of them, or 10 percent of the work force, would be laid off on May 20 as Meta remade itself for the artificial intelligence era…

On Wednesday, the ax fell. The layoffs began in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere were notified early Wednesday morning in their respective time zones.

It’s not just the job losses that are upsetting people at Meta, it’s the fact that employees were being asked to help train their AI replacements by gathering data on how they work.

In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them.

What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta’s artificial intelligence models could learn “how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers.”…

Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt A.I. tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees’ computer work to feed and train its A.I. models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending…

In a statement, Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesman, said the purpose of the new employee tracking program was to train the company’s A.I. products. “There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,” he said.

There was no opt-out for the AI training. If you used a company computer or laptop, you were a participant. Some employees circulated a petition to stop the tracking of data but that seems to have gone nowhere.

The SF Standard interviewed an employee last week who spoke anonymously about the vibe inside the office.

There’s a lot of doomsday joking going around. Very openly in [chat] groups that include directors and even VPs, people are posting memes about getting laid off, dancing skeletons, these kinds of things.

The other thing that’s a bit strange is that leadership is really not talking at all about the layoffs. The expectation is sort of like, “Be an adult, suck it up. This is what it’s like to have a job.” And it’s a little shocking, the lack of compassion. Of course, people are going to be upset that they may lose their job. Of course, that’s going to have an impact on productivity. Imagining there’s a world in which that may not be true is delusional…

Are people taking mental health leave?

Absolutely. It’s actually reasonably common at Meta. It feels like a bit of an open secret. There’s a lot of people in my group who are out on leave right now.

The severance being offered seems very generous, 16 weeks plus another two weeks for every year you worked at the company. But the real fear may be that exiting employees will have a hard time finding new jobs in the field for the same reason these layoffs are happening: AI means less need for employees.

If you get laid off, can you find another job in tech?

I really don’t know. I do know a good number of people in my field who I consider to be very talented who have not had a lot of luck and are still looking six months or a year later. That makes me very nervous. At the same time, I’ve been working for a long time. I have a lot of connections in the Bay Area, so I’m hopeful that some of my fear is overblown. I don’t really wanna find out.

Meta is far from the only company facing these same pressures.

In 2025, companies directly pointed to their use of AI in announcing 55,000 job cuts — more than 12 times the number of layoffs attributed to AI just two years earlier, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Of those job losses, 51,000 were in tech, with most of the cuts concentrated in tech-heavy states such as California and Washington.

Some have suggested that AI is just a pretext for making cuts, but the keylogging and AI training at Meta seems to suggest they really are planning to replace a lot of these employees with AI. It’s certainly interesting that the tech industry that is creating AI also turns out to be the first industry to experience the changes it creates. 

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