Meta Workers Brace for Layoffs as AI Push and Job Cuts Collide

New York Post, CNBC, and Business Insider contributed to this report.

A rough week is rolling in for Meta’s workforce.

The company is preparing to slash about 10% of staff globally, or nearly 8,000 jobs, as it pours more money into artificial intelligence. For employees, that has turned the countdown to Wednesday into something closer to a panic timer.

One longtime Bay Area Meta worker told the San Francisco Standard they have been struggling badly with the uncertainty.

“I tend to cry in the shower,” the employee said anonymously. “I definitely spend a good amount of that time sort of despondent somewhere in my house.”

That kind of blunt misery has become part of the mood inside Meta. Workers say the process feels cold, opaque and strangely personal at the same time. People do not know whether they are safe. They also do not know how the cuts are being decided.

And when the layoff email lands, that is basically the end of the story. Employees say they will lose access to internal systems before they even learn they are out, leaving them to piece together what happened from LinkedIn and whatever rumors are floating around.

One engineer said they even built a private spreadsheet to track layoff status. Others say they have learned a colleague was terminated only after seeing an internal profile marked “deactivated.” That is the kind of detail that sticks.

For many staffers, the stakes are obvious. Some are the sole breadwinners at home. Some have already been at Meta for more than a decade. And for people living in the Bay Area, where the cost of staying afloat is brutal, a high-paying job can feel less like a luxury than a lifeline.

“I am generally dissatisfied with leadership and angry,” the employee said. “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job.”

Meta’s cuts are part of a bigger tech shakeout. Across the industry, companies are shedding jobs while shifting huge sums into AI. So far this year, tech layoffs have already crossed roughly 110,000. Meta is one of the most aggressive names in that wave.

The company already trimmed more than 1,000 Reality Labs and content moderation jobs earlier this year. It also scrapped 6,000 open roles. That came after the far larger cuts of 2022 and 2023, when Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” swept through the company and eventually eliminated 21,000 jobs.

The tone from the top has changed too. In 2022, Zuckerberg publicly admitted Meta had overhired during the pandemic and said, “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.” This time around, there is no apology, just a memo about efficiency and more AI spending.

That spending is getting bigger. Meta recently boosted its 2026 capital expenditure forecast by up to $10 billion, putting the total as high as $145 billion. The company says the layoffs help offset those investments. Employees hear something else: headcount is down, AI is up, and the middle is getting squeezed.

There is also growing unease about how Meta is using its own people to feed that AI push. A new internal tracking system, the Model Capability Initiative, collects data such as mouse movements and keystrokes from work computers. Some staffers have called it dystopian. Others have protested it openly.

That has not exactly improved morale. Data from anonymous employee network Blind shows Meta’s overall worker rating has dropped sharply from its peak in 2024, with culture ratings falling even more. Meta is also lagging behind some of its big-name peers in employee sentiment.

Investors may see all this as part of a broader AI reset. Workers inside Meta seem to see something harsher: a company moving fast, cutting deep and asking them to trust the process while the floor keeps shifting under their feet.

One employee put it plainly: they feel torn. Working at Meta, they said, is a tradeoff. The money is good, but the cost is real.

That may be the clearest read on the place right now. Huge company. Huge AI ambitions. A lot of fear. And a very long Wednesday ahead.