San Francisco – Social media giant Meta has begun laying off approximately 8,000 employees, representing 10 percent of its global workforce, as the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram shifts its focus and spending heavily toward artificial intelligence development.
The cuts, which began on Wednesday, are being rolled out in three waves, starting at 4am local time for those affected. Workers on Meta’s integrity team, the group responsible for removing malicious content and hate speech, as well as members of its cybersecurity teams and content design division, are among those already affected, according to Business Insider.
Workers in the United States will receive 16 weeks of severance pay, plus an additional two weeks for every year of employment at the company, Meta confirmed to Al Jazeera. 
Beyond the layoffs, Meta said it would cancel plans to hire 6,000 people and would move 7,000 other employees into artificial intelligence workflow-related roles.
The restructuring comes amid reports of declining morale at the Mark Zuckerberg-led company following the launch of an AI tracking programme for workers, which Meta uses to train its own AI models. More than 1,500 employees signed a petition demanding the company not collect their data, according to the Wall Street Journal. One unnamed policy employee told Wired that morale is low partly because the US workforce is “being used to train the AI models that will replace them.”
Workers have also flagged cuts to annual raises, with median total compensation falling by nearly $30,000.
Zuckerberg, ranked sixth on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has made clear that AI is where Meta’s money is going. Capital expenditures are forecast to reach between $125bn and $145bn for the year, more than double the figure from 2025. The company is pouring resources into its Meta Superintelligence initiative.
“The way to think about the investment is that we’re making a bet [on] the individual things that people care about, and that people are going to be more important in the future,” Zuckerberg said during an earnings call in April.
The Meta cuts form part of a broader trend across the technology sector. A recent Goldman Sachs survey found that AI-driven layoffs account for more than 16,000 payroll cuts per month globally this year, with Cisco also announcing cuts of roughly 4,000 workers around the same time.
