Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is set to lay off 10% of its global workforce as the company refocuses on artificial intelligence, according to an internal memo shared with employees and reviewed by Bloomberg.
This memo confirms rumors that Reuters had first reported on Sunday, April 19.
The first round of sweeping layoffs is set for May 20, with a second round scheduled for the second half of the year, as the company aims to reduce its workforce by 20%, according to three sources who spoke with Reuters.
These layoffs follow a trend in the tech industry, which has seen a large wave of layoffs as companies replace white-collar workers with AI-assisted tools. Earlier this year, Amazon announced it would lay off about 30,000 employees across its Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video, and human resources departments as it expanded its use of AI tools.
As of April 23, it’s unclear which of Meta’s 90 global offices will be affected by the layoffs. At the end of 2025, Meta employed 78,865 people worldwide, according to documents it shared with the federal government.
USA TODAY reached out to Meta for comment on the sweeping layoffs, but had not heard back by the time of publication.
Meta’s Shift to AI
At the beginning of the year, Meta announced it would lay off about 1,500 workers, or about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, as the company shifted away from its metaverse business model and into its Meta Superintelligence Labs.
In April, Meta unveiled the “Muse Spark” family of artificial intelligence models, which it expected to compete with already established AI models like Gemini 3.1, created by Google, and GPT 5.4, created by OpenAI.
This announcement stemmed from Meta’s 2025 shift in focus to create a natively coded artificial intelligence. The company had fallen behind in the AI race as Meta had put much of its investments into the metaverse. Meta initially invested $10 billion into the company to fund its research into new technologies. However, the company’s 2024 fourth-quarter earnings revealed that Meta had lost more than $60 billion in operating costs.
But with the metaverse’s failure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg began pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into AI.
“We are at an exciting point for our company, where we have continued runway to improve our core services today as well as the opportunity to build new AI-powered experiences and services that will transform how people engage with our products in the future,” Meta said in its 2025 third-quarter report. “Next year will enable us to continue to deliver strong revenue growth in 2026, while our progress on AI models and products will position us to capitalize on new revenue opportunities in the years to come.”
