And as CNBC reported Monday (May 18), those layoffs could be part of a larger series of cuts at the tech giant.
Current and former Meta employees told the network this has ushered in an “emerging sense of dread” at the company, in part because additional layoffs are expected this year, including another possible round of cuts in August.
Meta cut around 1,000 workers from its Reality Labs division in January and laid off hundreds of additional workers in March. According to the CNBC report, the company also decided to move away from third-party vendors and contractors handling content-moderation.
At the same time, Meta is also increasing its artificial intelligence (AI), raising its 2026 guidance for capital expenditures last month by up to $10 billion, reaching as high as $145 billion.
In announcing the coming layoffs, a week before disclosing the increased capital spending, Meta told employees that the reductions are “all part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.”
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
The CNBC report characterizes the company’s tone here as “dramatically” different from the cuts it made in 2022, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an apologetic memo to staff acknowledging that he overhired during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” Zuckerberg wrote.
So far this year, there have been nearly 110,000 layoffs at 137 tech companies, the report added, citing Layoffs.fyi. That’s compared to roughly 125,000 cuts during all of 2025.
In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month Meta’s new personal AI agent Hatch, and the edge it has—along with Google’s Remy—over OpenClaw: they are both part of the two firms’ existing apps.
That positioning is in keeping with where consumer behavior is headed. PYMNTS Intelligence research has found that more than six out of every 10 U.S. consumers had used a dedicated AI platform in the past year.
“Neither Google nor Meta face the cost problem that ended OpenClaw’s cheap access,” PYMNTS added.
“Both own the computing infrastructure that their assistants run on. When Anthropic raised the price of running OpenClaw, millions of users were left without an affordable option. Google and Meta are building for exactly that audience into the places those users already are.”
