Meta fires again. The Menlo Park-based tech multinational is preparing a new plan to downsize its global workforce in addition to the cuts already carried out in recent years. The news is not yet official, but is based on a tip received by Reuters from three sources familiar with the company’s plans (which has not yet been denied).
According to one of the sources, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram will already lay off around 10% of its global workforce, or almost 8,000 employees, in May, while a further reduction in staff could materialize in the second half of the year. However, there are no details on the second tranche of layoffs, also because the managers of the multinational reserve the right to review their plans based on developments in the field of artificial intelligence. According to Reuters, however, in total Meta could send home 20% of its employees, but at the moment there are no certainties.
The reorganization of Meta and the role of the AI
Staff reductions are nothing new for multinationals in the tech sector which had already begun to reduce staff after the pandemic after a period of go-go hiring and generalized euphoria. Today’s context is very different and cuts to the workforce are often the result of company reorganizations caused by the development of AI. As far as Meta is concerned, company leaders foresee a future with fewer hierarchical levels and fewer staff thanks to the support of artificial intelligence.
Unlike 2022, “the year of efficiency”, Meta operates today in a context of financial solidity, with revenues that have exceeded 200 billion dollars and profits of 60 billion in the last financial year. Today the tech giant has 79 thousand workers spread across the globe. In recent weeks, UsaToday reports, Meta has reorganized teams in its Reality Labs division and moved engineers from across the company into a new “Applied AI” organization tasked with accelerating the development of artificial intelligence agents that can write code and perform complex tasks autonomously.
According to data from Layoffs.fyi, the technology sector has already recorded over 73,000 layoffs in the first quarter of 2026, confirming a trend towards the replacement of human labor with intelligent automation systems with high marginal return.