Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wears Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, as he delivers a speech introducing a new line of smart glasses, during the Meta Connect event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US, September 17, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees of his plan by the end of 2022 to lay off 11,000 workers, with cuts to increase to 21,000, and regretted admitting he had hired during the Covid crisis.
“I made a mistake, and I take responsibility for that,” Zuckerberg said in a message to employees in November of that year as the company’s stock was in freefall. In early 2023, Zuckerberg said the cuts were necessary as part of a “year of excellence for Meta.”
More than three years later, with the latest round of mass layoffs set to begin this week, the tone has changed dramatically. As of Wednesday, Meta is cutting its workforce by about 10%, or about 8,000 jobs. The company also scrapped plans to fill 6,000 open roles, according to a layoff memo in April.
The current layoffs follow the layoffs of about 1,000 workers in January at the company’s Reality Labs division, as well as layoffs in March that affected hundreds of additional employees, as well as a decision to move away from vendors and third-party contractors tasked with content testing.
Meanwhile, Meta is ramping up its investment in artificial intelligence, raising its 2026 guidance for capital expenditures last month by $10 billion, to as high as $145 billion.
In announcing the upcoming job cuts, a week before disclosing the capex increase, Meta told employees that the cuts “are all part of our ongoing effort to run the company more efficiently and allow us to reduce other investments we’re making.”
No apology from Zuckerberg. Meta declined to comment on this story.
Internally, there are rumblings of panic in many parts of the company, according to current and former Meta employees who asked not to be named to speak freely about the matter. That’s because more cuts are expected this year, including a possible round of layoffs in August, followed by another round later in the year, some of the sources said.
Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said during the first quarter earnings call that management “doesn’t really know how much the company will be in the future.” Regarding AI investments, Li said, “our experience so far is that we have continued to underestimate our computing needs as we have significantly increased capacity as AI development continues and our teams continue to identify compelling new projects and programs.”
Across the tech sector, workers are watching as prices balloon and AI startups soar to incredible heights while employers simultaneously cut the number of heads due to the rapidly emerging power of AI. So far in 2026, there have been nearly 110,000 layoffs at 137 tech companies, according to Layoffs.fyi, after nearly 125,000 cuts all of last year.
At this time, the reduction could reach a peak in 2023, when there were more than 260,000 workers, as many software and digital media companies have the right to follow the Covid hiring boom.
‘Changed equipment’
Umesh Ramakrishnan, chief strategy officer at search firm Kingsley Gate, said the current trend of AI taking over jobs is difficult for workers, but welcomed by investors.
“It’s easy to tell someone, ‘Hey, listen, I made a mistake by hiring more people than I should have,'” Ramakrishnan said. “Now the world understands that jobs are being replaced by machines, and if you don’t, shareholders get upset.”
Cisco the latest tech giant to make such an announcement, telling investors in a quarterly earnings call last week that it was cutting fewer than 4,000 jobs.
“Companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continue to shift investments to areas where the need and long-term value creation is strongest,” wrote Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins in a blog post, titled “Our Way Forward.”
Cisco shares rose more than 13% on Thursday, their best day since 2011, after the company reported better-than-expected results and raised its AI infrastructure guidance.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2026.
Krisztian Bocsi Bloomberg | Getty Images
Wall Street still isn’t sold on the Meta story, but that’s because the company’s AI strategy is fragmented and in constant flux. The stock is down about 7% so far this year and about 5% over the past 12 months, underperforming all of its peers except Microsoft.
Regardless of the worries that investors face, the feelings inside the company are intense, some long-term employees are asking questions about Meta’s AI under AI chief Alexander Wang, while estimating that now is the time to leave opportunities to other companies in the AI race, according to current and former employees.
Data compiled by Blind, an anonymous professional network that requires users to verify their employment with a work email address, reveals another internal malaise.
Meta’s overall rating of employees in Blind is down 25% from the peak in the second quarter of 2024 to the current period, with a 39% drop in the cultural rating. In all categories except compensation. The Meta has seen ratings drop and is making competitors incredibly ineffective Amazon, Google again NeflixBlind data reveals.
The company’s AI-filled courtroom press included the recent release of an employee tracking tool aimed at collecting data on employees’ actions, such as mouse movements and keystrokes on their work computers. The Model Capability Initiative (MCI), as it’s called, is part of Meta’s efforts to train AI models to enable digital agents that can perform a variety of coding and white-collar tasks.
Employees have characterized the data tracking tool as “dystopian,” according to messages seen by CNBC, with some employees expressing fears that personal information could be leaked. Some Meta employees have noticed that their work computers seem to be running slower since the company started the project, adding to their frustration, sources said.
Meta employees responded by creating an online petition urging Zuckerberg and leadership to shut down the project.
“Collecting and processing this type of data raises serious concerns about privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace,” the petition said. “It should not be the norm for companies of any size to be allowed to exploit their employees by illegally extracting their data for the purpose of AI training.”
Leo Boussioux, an assistant professor of information systems at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, described Meta as one of many companies currently restructuring their workforce and operations to accommodate “the fact that AI is changing the way we work.”
Boussioux said one goal could be to increase fear or pressure, using AI-related threats and layoffs as “a form of weapon that allows for culture change.” But, he said, it would show “poor managers who don’t know how to do this in a way that’s comfortable for employees.”
– CNBC’s Stephen Desaulniers and Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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