Oh no! You can no longer work for the Axis of Evil.

This is rough. If you want to work for the Devil you might need to fly over to Iran for an interview with the IRGC.

Meta Begins Laying Off Thousands of Employees as It Transforms Around AI

The cuts of roughly 8,000 jobs, or 10% of staff, are meant to offset the cost of the company’s AI investments

By Meghan Bobrowsky and Raffaele Huang, WSJ

Updated May 20, 2026

Meta Platforms began laying off thousands of employees.

Meta Platforms META 0.41%increase; green up pointing triangle began laying off thousands of employees Wednesday morning and reassigning thousands of others to AI-focused roles, according to an internal memo and people familiar with the matter.

Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, told staff last month that the coming layoffs would affect 10% of the company, or roughly 8,000 employees, and that the company would also cancel plans to hire for 6,000 open roles. In a follow-up memo on Monday, she said it would also move a separate 7,000 staffers into new AI-focused roles and transition a number of managers to individual contributor roles as part of the reorganization efforts.

Individual employees in Asia and Europe began receiving notifications that they would be affected early in their mornings, followed hours later by employees in the Americas, the people said.

In a memo to staff Wednesday morning, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg thanked laid off employees for their contributions and called AI “the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.”

“This is the most dynamic I have seen our industry. I’m optimistic about everything we’re building,” he said. “But success is not a given.”

Meta is full steam ahead into a gargantuan effort to reimagine its workforce and become more nimble to compete with AI-native startups. The company has flattened teams and started tracking employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks to help train its AI models on how to use computers.

Executives have said the job cuts are meant to offset Meta’s increasing spending on AI infrastructure. The company plans up to $145 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely to build out AI data centers and fill them with chips, as it seeks to create what is called personal superintelligence for its 3.5 billion daily users.

In a meeting with employees a few weeks ago, Gale didn’t rule out the possibility of future layoffs beyond this week’s. On a call with analysts the same week, Susan Li, Meta’s finance chief, said she wasn’t sure what the optimal size of the company would be in the future, citing “AI capabilities advancing rapidly.”

“If a team used to take 50 or 100 people and now it takes 10, having 50 or 100 people on that team can actually be counterproductive going forward, so I think we need to fix that,” Zuckerberg said during a recent internal meeting with employees.

In his Wednesday memo, the CEO said he didn’t expect other company-wide layoffs this year.

Sentiment among the company’s staffers is at its most negative level on record, according to an analysis of posts by the anonymous workplace site Blind. More than 1,500 employees have signed a petition demanding Meta not collect employee “computer-use” data to train its AI models.

When asked during its announcement if there was a way to opt out of the AI computer-tracking program, a Meta executive replied that there wasn’t.

In a series of recent internal memos and essays over the past few months, Meta’s technology chief Andrew Bosworth, who has been tasked with getting workers to use more AI in their day-to-day roles, has painted a picture of what he expects the company to look like in the future.

“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work,” he said in one of the posts. “Our role is to direct, review and help them improve.”