- Meta is laying off nearly 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, amid restructuring
- Employees in Singapore received early termination notices, followed by Europe and the US
- Layoffs impact engineering and product teams, while 7,000 move to AI-focused roles
Meta's latest round of layoffs has triggered widespread discussion online after a viral post from an employee highlighted the emotional fallout inside the company and questioned how the cuts were decided. Notably, the company has begun laying off nearly 8,000 employees, around 10 percent of its workforce, as part of a broader restructuring tied to its growing focus on artificial intelligence. According to reports, employees in Singapore were among the first to receive termination notices, with some informed as early as 4 am local time. Staff in Europe and the United States were also expected to receive updates in phased waves.
The cuts are expected to hit engineering and product divisions particularly hard. At the same time, Meta plans to move around 7,000 employees into AI-focused teams, reduce layers of management, and shut thousands of open positions as it reorganises around AI-driven operations and products.
Amid the restructuring, a post on the anonymous workplace forum Blind gained traction after a Meta employee described the guilt of remaining employed while a teammate lost her job. The employee said layoffs should not automatically be seen as a reflection of poor performance, describing the terminated colleague as dependable, humble, and exceptionally hardworking.
"Please don't think people laid off from Meta are bad performers, I'm an average performing scrub and I feel so bad for surviving when my teammate got laid off," the employe wrote.
According to the post, the woman had spent months working under intense pressure on a high-priority project, regularly sleeping less than four hours a night while meeting tight deadlines. The employee claimed she frequently worked through the early hours of the morning, continued contributing despite health issues linked to overwork, and had never received performance warnings. The sudden layoff left coworkers confused, especially given her track record on key projects.
"My teammate is super humble and reliable. She was very responsible and recently worked on a project that had a really tight deadline. She gave it her all and was sleeping less than 4 hours almost 80% of the time throughout several months. I think she fell sick many times due to overwork and now she suddenly got cut I seriously don't know why they chose her out of all people when she had a great track record and worked on important projects and IC4 but had no red or yellow zone. Very well-mannered and behaved too. I'm so sad I can't believe they did this right after she slogged her ass off. I remember the past few months I saw her publishing commits at 3am, then at 6am. Like, when did you even sleep wtf," the post read.
The post quickly resonated with current and former tech workers, many of whom argued that recent layoffs across the industry increasingly appear driven by restructuring priorities and cost management rather than individual performance alone.
One user wrote, "These cuts are random. We lost some best people too. Don't be too hard on yourself." Another said, "Good news is she learned a lession not to give a company a second of your health and free time."
A third user summed up the situation, saying, "Survivor's guilt is real and what you are feeling says a lot about the kind of person you are. The hardest truth about these layoffs is that they are rarely about individual performance and more about org structure, team priorities and budget decisions made by people who never even looked at her commit history. The fact that she gave everything she had and still got cut is genuinely heartbreaking and it is okay to feel angry about that. Be there for her right now, a simple message checking in means more than most people realize when someone is processing a sudden layoff. And you are right, the people who got cut at Meta are not bad performers, they are just people who got caught in a business decision that had nothing to do with their worth."
Meta's workforce overhaul comes as the company ramps up investments in AI infrastructure, AI agents and automation tools as part of a wider transformation remaking roles across the tech industry. The layoffs also arrive amid a broader wave of job cuts across major technology firms, including LinkedIn, which reportedly cut around 600 roles the same day.
