- Meta has started laying off around 8,000 of its employees, marking a reduction of 10% in its workforce.
- Meta has said that layoff is part of a major restructuring to offset investments and boost efficiency.
- US employees will get a severance package amounting to 16 weeks in base pay, plus two weeks for every year of continuous employ
Meta has started laying off around 8,000 of its employees, marking a reduction of 10% in its workforce. The American tech giant has said that the move is part of a major restructuring to offset investments and boost efficiency.
As the layoffs have made waves in the tech industry, Meta's severance package for the employees has also drawn attention. US employees will get a severance package amounting to 16 weeks in base pay, plus two weeks for every year of continuous employment, Business Insider reported.
Apart from that, workers will also get 18 months of healthcare coverage for them and their families. Employees outside the US who were impacted by the job cuts will receive similar packages that vary by country.
Separate from the layoffs, Meta will move over 7,000 workers into newly created AI-focused teams, the company's Chief People Officer Janelle Gale announced. The departures and reshuffle combined affect around 20% of Meta's workforce. The company had around 78,000 employees at the end of March.
We're now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership," Gale wrote in a memo seen by Reuters.
What Meta's Layoffs Indicate
The changes are part of an overhaul as Meta increases its investments in artificial intelligence in a bid to make AI agents central in both its approach to work internally and its product offerings.
Meta has stated that its capital expenditures will reach as high as $145 billion this year, driven partially by higher memory prices and buildout of new AI data centres, the NY Post reported.
The company is expected to announce more job cuts in the second half of 2026, but the exact timing and scope of the layoffs remains unclear.
Zuckerberg has sought to reduce Meta's management ranks in recent years, slashing over 20,000 jobs in 2022 and 2023 as part of what was termed a “year of efficiency” at the company.
The layoffs announced by Meta also reflect a broader trend of job cuts in the tech sector. The first three months of 2026 saw 52,050 tech layoffs, as per a report by executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a 40% jump from the same period last year. For the tech layoffs in March, AI alone accounted for 25% of the job cuts, up from 10% in February.
