Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has reportedly told its North American employees to work from home Wednesday – when it will lay off 10% of its global workforce as part of a major restructuring.
The companywide bloodbath will take place in three waves, with impacted workers learning their fate by email at 4 a.m. local time in their region, according to an internal document obtained by Reuters.
Meta’s human resources chief Janelle Gale said in the document that executives “will announce org changes” alongside the layoffs. About 7,000 employees are expected to shift to new roles at the Facebook and Instagram parent.
“As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles into their new org structures,” Gale was quoted as saying by Reuters. “We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership.
“We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding,” she added.
The company is slashing managerial roles as part of the reorganization as it relies more heavily on artificial intelligence tools to get work done.
Ahead of the layoffs, one employee told the San Francisco Standard that the worker’s office has been in “chaos” as employees fear they’ll be axed.
“I am generally dissatisfied with leadership and angry,” the unnamed employee told the publication. “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job.”
Meta had nearly 79,000 employees at the start of the year – meaning that the upcoming round of layoffs will rank among the largest in the social media giant’s history.
The company previously said that laid-off workers would receive severance packages including at least 16 weeks of base pay, plus another two weeks for each additional year of employment at the company. They’ll also get healthcare and career support benefits.
In a memo last month, Gale said the cuts were part of an effort to “run the company more efficiently” as the company spends heavily on AI development.
Meta has said its capital expenditures will reach as high as $145 billion in this year alone, driven in part by its buildout of new AI data centers and higher memory prices.
Meta did not immediately return a request for comment.
The company is expected to conduct more layoffs in the second half of the year, though the exact timing and scope of those cuts has yet to be decided.
Zuckerberg has sought to “flatten” Meta’s management ranks in recent years. He slashed more than 20,000 jobs in 2022 and 2023 as part of what was infamously dubbed a “year of efficiency” at the company.
The layoffs come amid ongoing layoffs blamed on AI, especially in the tech sector.
The first three months of 2026 saw 52,050 tech layoffs — a 40% jump from the same period last year, according to executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
In March, AI led the list of causes employers listed for tech layoffs — accounting for 15,341 of the firings, or 25% of the total. A month earlier, the figure was 10%.
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