'Everyone Is Unhappy': Employees React As Meta Gears Up To Axe 8,000 Jobs On May 20

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is preparing to cut roughly 8,000 jobs even as it posts record profits, and employees say the mood inside the company has never been worse.

Meta is set to hand out approximately 8,000 pink slips on May 20, eliminating around 10 percent of its global workforce across Facebook, Instagram, and its other properties. The cuts will arrive just weeks after the company reported one of the most profitable quarters in its history, $56.31 billion in revenue and $26.8 billion in net income for Q1 2026. For many employees, that contradiction is proving impossible to stomach.

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According to a report by WIRED, which spoke to more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, the atmosphere inside the company is deeply troubled. "Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives," one Instagram employee told the outlet. Morale has sunk so low that several staffers say they are actively hoping to be laid off, if only to collect the 16 weeks of severance pay and 18 months of paid health care that come with an exit package.

More Layoffs Likely At Meta Even After 10% Workforce-Cut Begins From May 20

Meta's chief people officer says 'layoffs are necessary'

In a memo first reported by Bloomberg, Meta's chief people officer Janelle Gale told staff that the layoffs were necessary to 'run the company more efficiently' and to 'offset the other investments we are making.' CFO Susan Li reinforced that message during the Q1 earnings call, pointing to a 'leaner operating model' as essential to managing the company's ballooning capital expenditures, particularly its AI spending, which is projected to reach between $125 billion and $145 billion this year, nearly double the $72.2 billion spent in 2025.

Zuckerberg says job cuts result of 'AI infrastructure costs'

At a recent company town hall, Zuckerberg told employees the cuts were a direct result of AI infrastructure costs, and notably declined to rule out further reductions in the second half of the year.

The situation draws uncomfortable comparisons to 2023, when Zuckerberg declared Meta's 'Year of Efficiency', a cost-cutting campaign that resulted in roughly 21,000 job cuts across two rounds - 11,000 layoffs in November 2022 and 10,000 more the following March. According to Fortune, Meta has cut approximately 25,000 positions between 2022 and earlier this year. With the latest round of cuts, that cumulative toll is expected to surpass 33,000.

Meta Is Installing Tracking Software On All Its Employees' Computers & They Cannot Opt Out: What Does This Mean?

The key difference this time, however, is that Meta is not cutting from a position of weakness. Revenue grew 33 percent in Q1 2026, the company's fastest pace since 2021.

The layoff announcement is far from the only source of employee frustration. In February, Meta cut the stock portion of annual raises by 5 percent, compounding a 10 percent trim the year before. Median total compensation at the company fell from $417,400 in 2024 to $388,200 last year, according to WIRED.

Meta offers heavy remuneration to top AI researchers

The bitterness has been sharpened by the contrast with Zuckerberg's aggressive personal recruitment of top AI researchers, reportedly offering compensation packages of up to $100 million to staff Meta Superintelligence Labs, the new AI division launched last summer under former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang.

In April, Meta also began rolling out a surveillance program called the Model Capability Initiative on US employees' work laptops. The software captures keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and periodic screenshots from apps including Gmail and Slack, with the data used to train AI agents that can mimic human workflows. CTO Andrew Bosworth has confirmed there is no opt-out option, though European employees are exempt under GDPR. In response, employees at multiple US offices have begun distributing flyers calling Meta an 'Employee Data Extraction Factory' and directing colleagues to an online petition.

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