Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to take up the knife again for his own creation.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is preparing a global layoff program that will see about one in 10 employees, about 8,000 people, laid off starting next month. A second wave is expected before the end of the year.
The Silicon Valley giant has declined to release any numbers, but the direction will be uncomfortably familiar to the tens of thousands of employees who experienced Meta’s self-proclaimed “Year of Efficiency” in 2022 and 2023, when about 21,000 jobs were cut as its stock price fell and the company had to contend with a wave of coronavirus-era overhiring.
This time the reasoning is a little different. Meta is in solid financial shape, but Mr. Zuckerberg has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars to transform the business around artificial intelligence. The trade-off appears to be that a leaner organization with fewer layers of management and AI-powered engineers is expected to do the heavy lifting once done by armies of human workers.
According to Reuters, the first tranche of cuts is scheduled for May, with the timing and size of the later round yet to be determined. Meta employed nearly 79,000 people at the end of December, according to its most recent filing, meaning the opening salvo alone could shed nearly a tenth of that headcount.
Meta does not move in isolation. Amazon has already laid off 30,000 company employees in recent months, representing almost 10 percent of its employee base, while fintech group Block laid off almost half of its workforce, or around 4,000 positions, in February. In both cases, management clearly referred to efficiency gains through AI as justification.
The industry’s own body count confirms this. Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs across the tech sector, puts the number of jobs lost in the first four months of 2026 alone at 73,212. For all of 2024, the figure was 153,000, suggesting this year’s numbers are on track to eclipse anything seen in the post-pandemic shakeout.
At Meta, the restructuring is already in full swing. Teams within the Reality Labs division have been reshuffled in recent weeks, with engineers from across the group redeployed to a newly formed applied AI division. Its mission is to accelerate the development of AI agents capable of writing code and performing complex tasks without the need for humans to hold hands. Critics will note that Mr. Zuckerberg appears to believe he can replace a significant portion of his own workforce.
For Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses watching from across the Atlantic, the signal is telling. When the world’s largest tech employers openly argue that generative AI is now capable of displacing thousands of skilled knowledge workers, the pressure on all other companies to rethink the way they organize, recruit and deploy talent will only increase.
It remains to be seen whether the efficiency dividend will materialize as smoothly as Zuckerberg hopes. Meta’s cuts in 2022 were followed by a significant recovery in profitability and a soaring stock price, validating its tough approach in the eyes of Wall Street. But a second act on a similar scale will test whether AI can actually deliver the productivity miracle its proponents promise, or whether meta is simply trading one kind of risk for another.
