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Workers in Britain, the U.S. and other markets are set to be informed early the same day in their respective time zones as part of the company’s plan to cut 10% of its workforce. Employees have been encouraged to work from home amid the restructuring, as reported by Bloomberg.

The latest round of layoffs is expected to affect Meta’s engineering and product teams in particular, with further cuts possible later in 2026, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who declined to be identified because the information is not public.

In a memo circulated on May 18, Meta said around 7,000 employees had also been reassigned to newly created teams focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents, Reuters reported.

The company, which has committed more than US$100 billion in AI capital expenditures for 2026, employed just under 80,000 people at the end of March, before the reassignments and layoffs.

“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,” Meta’s head of people Janelle Gale said in the memo. “We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding.”

Meta has undergone several rounds of layoffs in recent years as CEO Zuckerberg pursued greater efficiency. He has encouraged engineers to use AI agents for coding and other tasks, outlined plans to monitor employees’ devices to improve the technology, and spent time developing his own AI-powered assistant to help handle some CEO responsibilities, including gathering employee feedback. In total, the layoffs and transfers will hit about 20% of the company’s workforce.

The changes have sparked backlash among Meta employees, with staff protesting the measures through flyers distributed at the company’s offices and critical posts on its internal communications platform, Workplace.

More than 1,000 employees have signed a petition opposing the installation of mouse-tracking software intended to train Meta’s artificial intelligence models to replicate how humans interact with computers.

Across the tech industry, employees are grappling with a surge in stock prices and soaring valuations for AI startups even as companies reduce headcount amid the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, according to CNBC.

So far in 2026, nearly 110,000 jobs have been cut across 137 tech companies, following about 125,000 layoffs recorded for the whole of last year, according to Layoffs.fyi.

At the current pace, job cuts could near the 2023 peak, when more than 260,000 workers were laid off as software and digital media firms downsized after the hiring boom during the Covid-19 pandemic.