Facebook’s parent company has begun notifying staff worldwide that they are out of a job, with engineers and product teams bearing the brunt of a 10 per cent cull designed to bankroll a $145bn artificial intelligence spending spree.
Meta Platforms started handing out redundancy notices on Wednesday morning, kicking off one of the most aggressive restructurings in Silicon Valley this year. As many as 8,000 roles, roughly a tenth of the company’s global headcount, are expected to disappear as Mark Zuckerberg shifts the business onto a leaner, AI-first footing.
The cuts are heavily concentrated in the company’s engineering and product divisions, according to a Bloomberg report, with around 350 jobs in Dublin, Meta’s European headquarters, set to go. The Irish capital has long been a critical hub for the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, hosting thousands of staff serving customers across the EMEA region.
Even before the redundancy letters landed, the wheels of internal change were already in motion. On Monday, some 7,000 employees were told they had been redeployed to newly formed teams charged with developing AI products, agents and assistants that will be threaded through Meta’s family of apps.
“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,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in an internal memo seen by staff this week.
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