Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, wears smart glasses equipped with artificial intelligence. (archive image)Image: keystone
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Around ten percent of the workforce at Meta is expected to lose their jobs. And the next wave is expected to follow in the second half of the year.
April 18, 2026, 4:05 p.mApril 18, 2026, 4:05 p.m
The Facebook parent company Meta is planning the first major wave of layoffs of the current year for May 20th. Around 8,000 employees – around ten percent of the global workforce – are expected to lose their jobs. This was reported by the Reuters news agency, citing three people familiar with the plans. Meta itself declined to comment.
It shouldn’t stop there: further job cuts are planned for the second half of the year, the exact extent of which has not yet been determined. The management reserves the right to adapt the plans depending on the progress in artificial intelligence.
AI as a driver of transformation
The background is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s billion-dollar AI course. The company is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to fundamentally redesign internal processes. The aim is for a future with flatter hierarchies and higher efficiency through AI-supported employees, according to company circles.
In the past few weeks, Meta had already restructured teams in its Reality Labs division and moved developers to a new department called “Applied AI”. This is intended to develop AI agents that can program independently and complete complex tasks. According to Reuters, some employees are also about to be transferred to the newly founded Meta Small Business unit.
Biggest cut since the “Year of Efficiency”
The planned job cuts are the largest at Meta since the “Year of Efficiency” declared by Zuckerberg at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, when around 21,000 jobs were lost (Watson reported). Unlike back then, the group is now in a much better financial position: Last year, Meta generated a profit of $60 billion on sales of more than $200 billion.
Meta is not alone with this course. Amazon and the financial technology company Block also recently cut massive jobs with reference to AI. According to the website Layoffs.fyi, more than 73,000 employees across the industry have already lost their jobs this year.