Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s goodbye message to 8,000 fired employees also has two promises for the 70,000 who survived layoffs
Mark Zuckerberg’s email landed in 78,000 inboxes on Wednesday morning, just as the first wave of layoff notices began going out in Singapore at 4 a.m. local time. To the roughly 8,000 employees losing their jobs, the Meta chief executive offered gratitude. To everyone else—the people still logged in, still wondering whether next month brings another round—he offered something rarer at the company right now: two specific promises. No more company-wide layoffs this year. And an acknowledgement, finally, that Meta has handled the run-up to all of this badly.The cuts amount to roughly 10 percent of Meta’s workforce. Notifications rolled out in three waves at 4 AM local time across regions on May 20, starting in Asia, then Europe, then the Americas. US staff are getting 16 weeks of severance plus two weeks for every year worked, along with 18 months of COBRA health coverage. Another 7,000 employees are being reassigned to new AI projects. Around 6,000 open roles are being scrapped.
What CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees who kept their jobs
Zuckerberg wrote that Meta did “not expect other company-wide layoffs this year”—the closest thing to a stability guarantee anyone at the company has heard in months. The memo’s contents were first published by The New York Times. Since the layoffs were initially flagged on April 23, employees have been working in what staffers described as a holding pattern, checking the internal directory, scavenging laptop chargers and free snacks, signing petitions.The second promise read more like an admission. Zuckerberg conceded that Meta had not been as clear in its communication as it should have been, and said he wanted that to improve. For people who spent four weeks not knowing whether their job still existed, the line carried weight—even if it arrived a month late.
Meta’s $145 billion AI bill is the real reason 8,000 jobs are going
The no-more-layoffs commitment comes with a footnote written by Meta’s own CFO. On the company’s Q1 earnings call on April 29, finance chief Susan Li told analysts she doesn’t know what Meta’s ideal headcount actually looks like anymore. Zuckerberg made the trade-off explicit on the same call. If a team used to need 50 or 100 people and now needs 10, he said, keeping the bigger team around becomes counterproductive.That isn’t the language of a company that has finished restructuring. Meta is spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on capital expenditure this year—nearly double its 2025 spend—with most of it pouring into data centres, custom chips and model training for Meta Superintelligence Labs. The 8,000 jobs being cut are explicitly meant to offset that bill. Meta’s stock dropped 6 percent after the earnings call.
Inside Meta’s layoff week: petitions, ‘the Draft’ and rock-bottom morale
The mood inside the company has been bleak for weeks. Internal sentiment on the anonymous workplace site Blind is at its lowest on record. More than 1,500 employees have signed a petition demanding Meta stop tracking their keystrokes, mouse movements and screen activity to train AI models—a program internally called the Model Capability Initiative. Flyers promoting the petition have been taped to office windows in New York. When an employee asked CTO Andrew Bosworth how to opt out of the tracking, the answer was that there was no opt-out.Workers have been responding to layoff posts on internal forums with salad emojis, a workaround for “salute.” At least three employee-built websites have been counting down to May 20, one of them titled “Big Beautiful Layoff.” In New York, hundreds of staff gathered at a bar on Tuesday night for an event whose invitation read: “Never a dull moment.”Inside the surviving organisation, a new team led by engineering vice president Maher Saba—called Applied AI and Engineering—has absorbed around 2,000 employees. Each manager oversees roughly 50 reports. Internally, some staff have started referring to the team as “the Draft.” Joining it was not optional. To retain at least one director-level employee, Meta dangled an additional $500,000 in equity, according to people familiar with the offer.Zuckerberg closed his memo with a familiar pitch. “Success isn’t a given. AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes,” he wrote. For the 70,000 employees still logged in, though, the promises that matter aren’t really about the next generation. They’re about whether the next four weeks will look anything like the last four—and whether the stability Zuckerberg promised this year holds longer than that.
