Meta layoffs: Employees told to work from home as countdown begins for 4 am

Meta is about to lay off roughly 8,000 people on Wednesday, May 20, and the company has now told its North American staff to work from home that day as the cuts roll out. A leaked internal memo from HR chief Janelle Gale, first reported by Reuters, lays out the mechanics: emails will land at 4 AM local time across three regional waves, and around 7,000 employees who keep their jobs will be shifted into four new AI-focused organisations.The layoffs amount to about 10% of Meta’s workforce, which stood at roughly 78,000 at the end of 2025. The company is also pulling the plug on 6,000 open roles it had been actively hiring for.

Meta layoffs push the company toward flatter teams, fewer managers, and AI-native org structures

In the memo, Gale told staff that many teams can now operate with smaller pods and fewer layers of management. “We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure,” she wrote, framing it as a productivity bet rather than pure cost-cutting. The four new organisations absorbing those 7,000 reassigned workers will be built around what Gale described as AI-native design principles, with significantly fewer managers per employee.Workers laid off in the US will get 16 weeks of base pay as severance, plus two extra weeks for every year spent at Meta. Healthcare and career support come bundled in. Employees outside the US will get similar packages on country-specific timelines.

Mark Zuckerberg’s $145 billion AI bet is quietly reshaping who stays at Meta

The cuts sit inside a much bigger spending shift. Meta has guided 2026 capital expenditure to between $125 billion and $145 billion, with most of that going into AI data centres, custom silicon, and model training. On the last earnings call, CFO Susan Li told investors she doesn’t really know what Meta’s ideal headcount looks like anymore in an environment where AI keeps moving the goalposts.Inside the company, mood has soured fast. Anonymous ratings on Blind show Meta’s overall employee score has fallen 25% from its 2024 peak, with the culture rating down 39%. A new internal tool called the Model Capability Initiative, which logs keystrokes and mouse movements to train Meta’s AI agents, triggered an employee petition last month asking Zuckerberg to shut it down. He has since told staff the data is not being used for surveillance, only to teach AI how people actually work on computers.This Wednesday won’t be the last round either. Meta leaders have already told staff that another wave is on the table for August, with a further round possible later in the year. Zuckerberg, on a recent Q&A, called AI “one of the most competitive fields, probably in history”—and Meta is rebuilding itself around that bet, one 4 AM email at a time.