May 14, 2026
It's a rough time to be working at Facebook, Instagram, or one of Meta's many other properties. Mark Zuckerberg's social media giant will reportedly hand out roughly 8,000 pink slips on Wednesday, May 20, eliminating about 10% of its global workforce. Notably, though, these cuts will arrive on the heels of one of the most lucrative quarters in the company's history: $56.31 billion in revenue and $26.8 billion in net income (1) for the first three months of 2026, per Meta's Q1 earnings filing. For many Meta employees, that stark contrast is apparently driving morale into the dirt.
According to a fresh report from WIRED (2), which interviewed more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, vibes at the company are way off course. According to one Instagram employee, "everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives." Several staffers told WIRED they are openly hoping to be laid off, if only to collect the 16 weeks of severance and 18 months of paid health care that come with it.
Massive profits, and cuts to match
In a memo first reported by Bloomberg (3), Meta's chief people officer Janelle Gale told staff the layoffs would help to "run the company more efficiently" and "offset the other investments we're making." Meta CFO Susan Li echoed that sentiment during the company's Q1 earnings call, saying a "leaner operating model" would help offset the company's massive capital expenditures (4), particularly around artificial intelligence, which will hit somewhere in the ballpark between $125 billion and $145 billion (5) this year, a massive leap up from its $72.2 billion spend in 2025 (6).
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At a recent town hall, Zuckerberg told employees (7) the cuts were a direct consequence of AI infrastructure costs and declined to rule out further reductions in the second half of the year. It's highly reminiscent of what Zuckerberg had said three years ago, when he declared 2023 to be Meta's "Year of Efficiency," which led to roughly 21,000 job cuts across two waves — 11,000 layoffs in November 2022 (8) and 10,000 more the following March (9). According to Fortune (10), Meta has, in total, cut some 25,000 positions between 2022 and earlier this year. After the reported cuts this month, that cumulative toll should push above 33,000.
The difference this year is that, unlike that aforementioned "Year of Efficiency," where Meta felt it needed to course-correct after a boom in hiring during the pandemic, Meta is currently operating from a dominant position. Revenue grew 33% in Q1 — Meta's fastest pace since 2021, according to CNBC (11).
It's been a rough year for Silicon Valley at large. Across the tech sector, more than 135,000 workers have been laid off through the first five months of the year, per Layoffs.fyi (12). As Moneywise previously reported, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are collectively predicting to spend roughly $725 billion on AI this year, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called "a leadership failure, not a technology constraint."
The spring of Meta employees' discontent
The complaints within Meta aren't just about the impending layoffs. Employees are still rankled by Meta's decision in February to cut the stock portion of annual raises by 5%, on top of a 10% trim the year before. According to WIRED, median total compensation at Meta fell from $417,400 in 2024 to $388,200 last year. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has been busy personally recruiting AI researchers with reported nine-figure compensation packages (13) — some reaching $100 million — to staff Meta Superintelligence Labs (14), the division he launched last summer under former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang (15).
In April, Meta also began deploying surveillance software, called the Model Capability Initiative, on U.S. employees' work laptops. According to CNBC (16), the program captures keystrokes, clicks, mouse movements and periodic screenshots from apps like Gmail and Slack to train AI agents capable of mimicking human workflows. There is no opt-out, CTO Andrew Bosworth has confirmed (17); European employees are exempt because of GDPR. In response, Meta staffers at multiple offices across the U.S. recently started handing out flyers (18) calling Meta an "Employee Data Extraction Factory" and pointing colleagues to an online petition.
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (1),(8),(9); WIRED (2); Bloomberg (3),(13); The Globe and Mail (4); Meta Investor Relations (5),(6); Fox Business (7); Fortune (10); CNBC (11),(16); Layoffs.fyi (12); Wikipedia (14); Business Insider (15); MSN (17); Engadget (18)
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
