According to a March 2026 report by Reuters, Meta Platforms is considering its largest wave of layoffs since the famous "year of efficiency" of 2022–2023. The plans call for cutting as much as 20% of the entire workforce, which means between 15,000 and 16,000 positions out of the company's nearly 79,000 staff.
The decision is a direct consequence of multibillion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure and fits into a broad trend shaking the entire technology industry.
An Unprecedented Scale – What We Know About the Planned Cuts
Information about the planned layoffs at Meta emerged on March 13, 2026, when Reuters cited three independent sources close to the company.
According to them, the company's leadership has already instructed managers to draw up reduction plans. The scale of the cuts has not yet been finalized, and the implementation date itself remains unknown. Meta press spokesman Andy Stone described the reports as "speculative reporting on theoretical approaches," neither confirming nor denying the information outright.
If the planned 20% threshold became reality, it would be the largest single round of job cuts in the company's history. At the end of 2025, Meta employed exactly 78,865 people, which means as many as 16,000 people could be out on the street.
For comparison, the dramatic layoffs of 2022–2023, which remain a symbol of the industry's turning point to this day, covered a total of 21,000 employees, but were spread across two rounds and accounted for about 13% of the workforce at the time.
"Projects that once required large teams can now be carried out by one very talented person." – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, January 2026.
Today, this statement by Zuckerberg is read in the industry as a preview of the changes to come. For more than a year, the head of Meta has consistently pointed to rising productivity as the main argument for the mass automation of the company's internal processes.
This is accompanied by spectacular investments: the acquisition of the Chinese startup Manus for nearly $2 billion and the purchase of the Moltbook platform – a social network built specifically with AI agents in mind. On top of that comes a spending plan of between $115 billion and $135 billion in 2025 alone for building data centers, its own chips, and infrastructure capable of handling increasingly powerful language models.
Meta's History of Cuts – From the "Year of Efficiency" to the AI Era
To understand the weight of the current plans, it is worth going back to November 2022. At that time, Mark Zuckerberg announced the layoff of 11,000 employees – about 13% of the workforce at the time – justifying the decision with faulty forecasts regarding the maintenance of pandemic-era growth rates. A few months later, in the spring of 2023, another wave of cuts covering 10,000 positions was announced.
Together, both rounds consumed more than 21,000 jobs and cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in severance and restructuring costs.
Paradoxically, those moves were assessed positively by analysts. Meta returned to a path of dynamic revenue growth, and the number of employees steadily increased. At the end of 2025, employment was 6% higher than a year earlier – which makes the potential cuts an even more telling signal of a strategic shift. This time, the driver of the layoffs is not a correction after pandemic overhiring, but a deliberate choice: replacing human labor with artificial intelligence tools.
However, the multibillion-dollar spending comes at a price. In 2025, serious problems with the Llama 4 model were revealed, drawing criticism for weak benchmark results and a tendency to generate outputs optimized for tests rather than reflecting real-world usefulness. As a result, the planned Behemoth variant was abandoned.
The new model, codenamed Avocado, being developed by a special superintelligence team, is also facing repeated delays and may not see the light of day before May 2026.
Race of the Giants: Google, Amazon, Microsoft – Who Is Cutting, How Much, and Why
Meta's plans do not exist in a vacuum.
The technology industry is experiencing a wave of layoffs justified by accelerated AI investments, and Meta is merely the most spectacular example of this trend so far.
Below is a breakdown of key rounds of cuts at the largest players between 2022 and 2026:
- Meta 2022–2023 ("year of efficiency"): 21,000 positions, about 13% of the workforce, reason: correction after overhiring + cost optimization
- Meta 2026 (plan): up to 16,000 positions, about 20% of the workforce, reason: AI investments worth up to $600 billion by 2028
- Google 2023: 12,000 positions, about 6–7% of the workforce, mainly in the Cloud division; restructuring around Gemini and DeepMind
- Google 2024–2025: several hundred to several thousand positions, below 5%; selective cuts in hardware and AI teams, parallel recruitment of experts
- Amazon January 2026: 16,000 positions, about 10% of the workforce; automation and cloud investments exceeding $100 billion
- Amazon 2022–2023: 27,000 positions; correction after pandemic expansion
- Microsoft 2023: 10,000 positions, about 5% of the workforce; restructuring around the partnership with OpenAI
- Microsoft July–August 2025: about 9,000–15,000 positions, 4–6% of the workforce; cuts in sales, marketing, and gaming; AI budget at the level of $80 billion
- Block February 2026: about 4,000 positions, as much as 50% of the workforce; CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly pointed to AI as a substitute for employees
"Many companies use artificial intelligence merely as a pretext to justify layoffs that in reality stem primarily from excessive hiring during the pandemic years." – Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, commenting on the phenomenon known as AI-washing.Layoffs at Meta: The Scale and Reasons for the Cuts
The data compiled above clearly shows: Meta stands out with the largest planned percentage scale among all the giants, Amazon with the absolute number (taking both rounds into account), and Block with the radicalism of its approach. Google and Microsoft pursue a policy of more cautious, spread-out reductions while simultaneously recruiting AI specialists.
However, the common denominator is one key argument: AI tools make it possible to carry out the same tasks with smaller teams.
Investments vs. Layoffs – Meta's Economic Dilemma
In Meta's case, the scale of the financial bet on AI is exceptional even against industry standards. The company plans to spend $600 billion on data centers by 2028 – an amount exceeding the GDP of many European countries.
In 2025 alone, the AI infrastructure budget ranged from $115 billion to $135 billion. On top of that come multimillion-dollar compensation packages for leading AI researchers – according to Reuters, some of them amount to hundreds of millions of dollars over four years – as well as billion-dollar startup acquisitions.
There is, however, a fundamental difference compared with the competition that analysts point out: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft operate their own cloud platforms that directly monetize the computing power they build. Meta has no such source of revenue from AI infrastructure – the company sells advertising and, until now, has made its models available under an open-source model. The shift toward commercial, closed AI products is still underway and means a costly transformation of its entire business model.
A Goldman Sachs report from late 2025 estimated that by 2030, AI-based automation could replace or significantly transform between 25% and 30% of positions in the technology sector. The analytics firm Gartner, in turn, predicts that by 2027 more than 30% of new software projects at large corporations will be fully generated by AI tools without the involvement of programmers.
This is the context in which Zuckerberg's decisions – however socially controversial – have their own internal business logic.
The Human Cost of Digital Transformation
Behind the statistics lie concrete professional fates. Meta has become known as an employer offering some of the highest salaries in the industry – the average total compensation of a software engineer at the company is estimated at more than $300,000 a year.
A potential wave of layoffs would therefore hit a layer of employees who built careers in the Big Tech ecosystem and do not always have a parallel exit path. Meanwhile, the technology industry job market in 2025 and 2026 is far cooler than at the peak of the pandemic hiring boom.
Earlier, Meta had already cut about 1,500 positions in the Reality Labs division, shifting resources toward AI. Yann LeCun, the longtime chief AI scientist, also left, and hundreds of employees were laid off from the FAIR research unit. The company's structural transformation has been underway for many months – the latest reports are merely its most dramatic chapter.
"This is not just cost optimization – it is a deliberate rewriting of the contract between technology corporations and their employees. The era of stable employment in Big Tech is coming to an end." – Josh Bersin, labor market analyst and founder of The Josh Bersin Company, March 2026.
Critics of the phenomenon warn against what the industry has begun calling AI-washing: the tendency to cover with the banner of artificial intelligence layoffs that in essence stem from a correction after pandemic overinvestment in staffing.
In Meta's case, we are probably dealing with both causes at once – the company genuinely bears enormous AI infrastructure costs, but at the same time, in recent years it consistently increased employment, building capabilities that are now partly being replaced by automation.
What Next? Scenarios and Implications for the Market
For now, everything remains in the planning stage.
Meta has set neither a date for announcing the layoffs nor a final scale for the reductions. The coming weeks and months will be decisive – in particular the financial results for the first quarter of 2026 and progress in developing the Avocado model, which is meant to be the company's answer to growing competition from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Chinese AI laboratories.
Market observers note that Meta shareholders have so far reacted favorably to every round of cuts – after the layoffs were announced in 2023, the company's share price surged. Stock market logic may therefore incline the board to continue similar actions. The question analysts are asking, however, is different: will laying off thousands of experienced engineers and researchers actually accelerate the company's AI transformation, or weaken it at a critical moment in the technology race?
According to forecasts by the firm IDC from early 2026, global spending on AI and related infrastructure will exceed $500 billion in 2026, growing at a rate of about 28% year over year. In this race, Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft occupy places on the podium – and all four must answer the same question: how much human labor can, and should, be replaced by machines.
Meta Platforms, Inc.
Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard University dorm room as TheFacebook, today Meta Platforms is one of the five largest technology companies in the world by market capitalization. Listed on NASDAQ under the ticker META, the company controls an ecosystem that includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the augmented and virtual reality division Reality Labs. At the end of 2025, the company employed nearly 79,000 people worldwide and reported annual revenue exceeding $160 billion, of which more than 98% comes from digital advertising. Fun fact: for several months in 2021, the company officially bore the name Meta, changing it from Facebook, Inc. to emphasize its strategic pivot toward the metaverse – a vision it partly abandoned in favor of the current race in artificial intelligence.
