Meta Set to Lay Off Thousands of Workers Today

Meta is expected to lay off hundreds, if not thousands of workers in the U.S. this morning while also pushing to hire more machine learning engineers.

An internal memo authored by Meta’s Head of People Janelle Gale and seen by Reuters on Friday outlined the plans. Last month, Meta said it was planning to get rid of five percent of its “lowest performers.”

Notices are expected to start going out this morning at 5 a.m. local time and it will affect employees in the U.S. But staff in Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands will be exempt from the cuts “due to local regulations.” However, it will still affect more than a dozen other countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa; those affected workers will receive their notices between February 11 and February 18.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned staff that the job cuts are about raising the bar for performance management. As of September 30, Meta has a total workforce of over 72,000 people so a five percent reduction could affect around 3,600 jobs.

“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year,” Zuckerberg said in an internal memo. “But now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.” That performance cycle is expected to conclude in February, according to Fortune.

Some of the staff will be replaced with machine learning enineers. VP of engineering for Monetization Peng Fan sent out a separate memo on Friday asking employees to assist in the hiring process of AI engineers as well as other “business critical” engineering roles.

In 2023, Zuckerberg laid off tens of thousands of jobs in what he termed the “year of efficiency.” But this round of cuts has been characterized differently with the Zuck wanting the “strongest talent” while being able to bring in fresh faces.

Zuckerberg has made serious changes to the Facebook and Instagram parent company already this year: starting with getting rid of fact-checkers not long after President Trump was sworn in. He then went on the Joe Rogan podcast and declared masculine energy is good for corporate America while railing against a society that has become “very neutered or emasculated.”

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