- Meta will cut roughly 10% of its 78,000-person workforce on May 20, affecting about 7,800 employees.
- The company is also eliminating around 6,000 internal roles on top of the headline cut.
- Chief people officer Janella Gale framed the decision as a move to “run the company more efficiently.”
- The stated goal is to offset unspecified “other investments” — widely understood to mean AI infrastructure and talent.
- Impacted employees will be notified on May 20 via both their work and personal email accounts.
- Meta already ran a smaller round of layoffs in March, hitting hundreds of staff.
Meta told employees this week it plans to lay off roughly 10% of the entire company on May 20, according to an internal email obtained by Business Insider. With Meta’s global headcount standing above 78,000, the move will eliminate approximately 7,800 roles and mark the largest single-day workforce cut in the company’s history since the “year of efficiency” layoffs of 2023.
Meta Layoffs May 2026: What the Internal Memo Says
The memo, from chief people officer Janella Gale, states the mass layoff is being done to “run the company more efficiently” and to offset “other investments” the company is making. Those investments were not specified in the memo, but context makes them obvious: Meta has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data centers and top researcher compensation packages over the past 12 months.
On top of the headline 10% cut, Meta is eliminating roughly 6,000 additional internal roles — positions that will not be backfilled. Impacted employees will receive an email on May 20 to both their work and personal accounts. The company already ran a smaller layoff round in March that hit hundreds of workers, making this the second reduction of 2026 and the broadest since Mark Zuckerberg’s 2023 “year of efficiency” push.
Why Meta Is Cutting Jobs to Fund Its AI Push
Meta’s capex on AI has ballooned past competitors. The company is building out multiple hyperscale data centers, has been offering nine-figure compensation packages to individual AI researchers, and restructured its AI division last summer under a “Superintelligence” banner. Paying for all of that without a matching revenue jump means something has to give, and this week it’s payroll.
For the 7,800 people about to be cut, the timing is brutal. This is the worst tech job market in two decades, with Atlassian, Amazon, Dell, and now Meta all citing AI as the reason for workforce reductions. The pattern — fewer humans, more GPUs — is hardening into the default strategy across Big Tech for 2026.
