The company, which owns social networks Facebook and Instagram, as well as messenger WhatsApp, announced to its employees about planned layoffs on April 23. It also announced that it would not fill several thousand more vacancies for which it had previously intended to hire employees, the BBC reported.
The main reason for the layoffs is Meta’s huge spending on the development of artificial intelligence technologies: this year alone it intends to spend $135 billion on it. This is roughly equal to the total amount of money the company spent on AI in the previous three years.
Artificial intelligence replaces people
In January this year, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that the company intends to conduct another wave of layoffs this year.
He admitted that, according to his observations, artificial intelligence has helped employees significantly increase productivity – and now one person can realize projects that previously required a large team.
“I think 2026 will be the year that AI starts to fundamentally change the way we work,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta has already conducted two waves of layoffs this year, cutting about 2,000 employees. According to the BBC, the company’s staff had been expecting much larger job cuts for weeks.
Meta has already laid off tens of thousands of people since 2022. However, it has also hired new staff since then, so its total workforce should have remained roughly the same as it was before the first layoffs.
The staff cuts that Meta has now announced will be the largest since 2023.
Wave of layoffs in the technology sector
Several other companies have also announced layoffs this year related to heavy investment in AI technology.
Amazon laid off more than 30,000 people, and Oracle laid off more than 10,000. One of the smaller firms, Block, got rid of almost half of its employees: about 4,000 people. And Snap, which owns the popular messenger Snapchat, laid off about 1,000 employees.
In addition, on April 23, computer giant Microsoft offered employees with long service to voluntarily leave their jobs in exchange for cash payments.
Almost all of these companies explained their managers’ decisions to get rid of employees by expanding the capabilities of artificial intelligence – or investing in technologies based on it.
