Meta began cutting hundreds of jobs on Wednesday across Reality Labs, Facebook, recruiting, sales, and global operations, according to people familiar with the matter and LinkedIn posts from affected employees. The layoffs are the latest in a rolling series of workforce reductions that have accelerated sharply in 2026, as the company redirects resources toward artificial intelligence and away from divisions that no longer sit at the centre of Mark Zuckerberg’s strategic vision.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the restructuring in a statement, saying that teams across the company regularly implement changes to ensure they are positioned to achieve their goals, and that the company is working to find other opportunities for affected employees where possible.
The scale of the cuts
Meta employed 78,865 people at the end of 2025, according to its annual report. Wednesday’s layoffs, described by sources as affecting hundreds of employees, represent a small fraction of that total. But they do not arrive in isolation.
In January, Meta cut approximately 1,500 positions in its Reality Labs division, roughly 10 per cent of the unit’s workforce, and closed three VR game studios: Twisted Pixel, Sanzaru Games, and Armature Studio. Earlier in 2025, the company carried out performance-based terminations affecting around 3,600 employees, a process Zuckerberg framed as raising the bar on performance management. And in mid-March, Reuters reported that Meta’s senior executives had been asked to prepare workforce reduction plans of up to 20 per cent, a figure that would translate to roughly 15,000 positions if fully implemented. Meta called that reporting speculative.
The cumulative picture is one of sustained contraction. Since Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “year of efficiency,” a programme that eliminated more than 21,000 roles in 2022 and 2023, the company has never fully stopped cutting.
Where the money is going instead
The layoffs are inseparable from Meta’s AI spending commitments, which have grown to a scale that would have seemed implausible even two years ago. The company forecast capital expenditures of between $115 billion and $135 billion for 2026, nearly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025, with the bulk directed toward data centres, Nvidia GPUs, custom chips, and the infrastructure supporting its Llama model ecosystem and Superintelligence Labs.
Total company expenses for 2026 are projected at $162 billion to $169 billion. Analysts at Barclays have forecast a near-90 per cent drop in free cash flow as a result. When Meta’s stock rose nearly 3 per cent on the news of the potential 20 per cent layoffs in mid-March, the market’s message was blunt: investors want the spending, and they want the headcount to pay for it.
Meanwhile, Reality Labs, the division that absorbed the heaviest cuts in January, posted an operating loss of $19.2 billion in 2025, bringing cumulative losses since the unit’s creation to approximately $90 billion. Zuckerberg has said he expects 2026 to be the peak year for those losses, with gradual reductions beginning in 2027 as the division shifts its focus from VR headsets toward smart glasses and wearable AI devices.
The pattern across the industry
Meta is not cutting in isolation. More than 45,000 tech jobs have been eliminated globally in the first quarter of 2026, with AI cited as the driving force in at least one in five cases. Atlassian announced 1,600 redundancies in March, framing the cuts as an adaptation to the AI era. Amazon confirmed 16,000 corporate job losses in late January. Block eliminated 4,000 roles, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly citing AI’s growing capability to perform work previously done by humans.
The pattern is consistent: companies are spending aggressively on AI infrastructure while reducing the human workforce those systems are designed to augment or replace. Whether the productivity gains materialise at the scale the spending implies remains an open question. Zuckerberg has claimed that output per engineer at Meta has risen 30 per cent since early 2025, driven by AI coding tools, and that power users have seen an 80 per cent year-over-year increase. Those figures, if sustained, would represent a genuine structural shift in how software companies operate. If they do not hold, the layoffs will look less like strategic repositioning and more like cost-cutting dressed in the language of transformation.
What comes next
The immediate question is whether the reported 20 per cent reduction plan will materialise in full. Meta has not confirmed it. But the cadence of cuts, from performance terminations to Reality Labs restructuring to this week’s cross-division layoffs, suggests that the company is executing a phased reduction rather than a single dramatic event.
For the employees affected on Wednesday, the distinction is academic. For Meta, the bet is that a leaner company spending $135 billion a year on AI infrastructure will outperform the one that employed 87,000 people at its 2022 peak. The next several quarters will determine whether that trade-off was prescient or premature.
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