After laying off 8,000 employees, Zuckerberg reassures staff: No more "company-wide" layoffs this year.

The axe has fallen on layoffs, but Zuckerberg says: That's it for this year.

On May 20, Meta officially launched the company's largest-ever round of restructuring—laying off about 8,000 people and shutting down 6,000 planned hiring positions, affecting nearly 14,000 jobs in total. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg made a promise to employees in an internal memo: There will be no more "company-level" layoffs this year.

According to the memo obtained by the Financial Times, Zuckerberg wrote: "I want to be clear that we do not anticipate any further company-level layoffs this year." He also admitted that the company’s internal communication “didn’t meet our own standards,” and said that this is something he hopes to improve.

However, the promise leaves room for flexibility. The report points out that Zuckerberg's statement does not rule out the possibility of layoffs in specific teams. In other words, partial adjustments outside of the "company-level" are still on the table.

Notices sent out in three waves at 4 a.m.

According to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider, Meta’s Head of HR Janelle Gale explained the layoff implementation plan in advance: Notifications were sent out at 4 a.m. in each region, in three waves covering different global time zones, from Asia Pacific to Europe, then to the Americas.

North American employees were asked to work from home that day and only learned their status after receiving an early morning email. One employee said that people had been in an “in limbo” state, awaiting confirmation of their job fate.

This round of layoffs affected about 8,000 people, approximately 10% of Meta's total workforce of around 78,000.

7,000 people transferred to AI—It’s not just layoffs

Another side of this personnel shakeup is large-scale strategic redeployment.

According to reports, Meta is reallocating over 7,000 employees to various newly established AI departments, including the Applied AI Engineering (AAI) department, Agent Transformation Accelerator, Central Analytics, and a newly formed enterprise solutions team.

Gale wrote in the memo that productivity improvements from AI have enabled the company to redeploy this group to more strategically valuable positions. Departmental leadership has incorporated “AI-native design principles” into the new organizational structure.

Meanwhile, corporate management layers will be significantly reduced company-wide. Gale wrote: “We have now reached a stage where many teams can operate in a flatter structure, acting faster and taking on more ownership via smaller pods/cohorts.” Some teams under Meta’s Reality Labs had already begun restructuring into small pod groups.

Why layoffs? AI burns cash, things must slim down

The logic behind this restructuring is AI.

Zuckerberg is betting billions of dollars on what he calls “personal super intelligence,” which includes building large-scale data centers and competitively recruiting top AI researchers. One goal is to catch up with Google and OpenAI—Meta’s Llama 4 model released last year was considered to lag behind competitors.

Last month's newly released model, Muse Spark, received a generally positive market response, but in certain capabilities still lags behind the competition.

On the product side, besides the existing AI chatbot, Meta is developing a highly personalized AI assistant to help billions of users handle everyday tasks; they’re also working on photo-realistic 3D avatars that can interact in real time, with the first version being a digital clone of Zuckerberg himself.

How cash-intensive is it? Meta disclosed in their April financial report that capital expenditure for 2026 is expected to nearly double, reaching $125 billion to $145 billion.

Zuckerberg is convinced that AI technology can help streamline human resources, especially in automating programming and engineering tasks.

Employee dissatisfaction continues to grow

News of the layoffs had already leaked more than a month ago, causing ongoing tension within the company.

Another sticking point is the issue of surveillance. Meta plans to install tracking software on employee devices to record mouse movements, clicks, keyboard input, and screen content to train AI models, with employees unable to opt out.

As of May 20, over 1,500 employees have signed a petition, demanding that Meta “not use employees' 'computer usage' data to train AI models.” Several employees told Business Insider that overall company morale is significantly strained.

In the memo, Zuckerberg expressed “thanks” to laid-off employees, saying this is the “most dynamic period” he has ever seen in the industry.

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