Meta has confirmed it will not repeat last year’s company-wide performance purge, assuring employees that the bottom 5% cull is not an annual initiative. This comes after recent layoffs in its Reality Labs division, which has incurred significant losses. The company is now shifting its focus and investment towards AI research.

Meta has told employees it won’t repeat last year’s company-wide performance purge, drawing a line under months of speculation about whether the bottom 5% cull would become an annual ritual. “These are individual cases not related to any company wide initiatives,” a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. “For example we are not doing any 5% low performers like we did last year.”The clarification arrives just weeks after Meta slashed roughly 10% of its Reality Labs workforce—over 1,000 employees, though some reports peg the number closer to 1,500. The cuts hit hardest in the teams building VR headsets and Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality social network that was supposed to justify Zuckerberg’s decision to rename Facebook to Meta back in 2021.

Reality Labs bled $70 billion since 2020, and Zuckerberg is now redirecting that money toward AI

The Reality Labs layoffs weren’t exactly a surprise. CTO Andrew Bosworth had called a division-wide meeting last month, describing it as the “most important” of the year and asking staff to show up in person—never a great sign. The New York Times reported that Zuckerberg had asked top executives to trim their 2026 budgets so the company could funnel more money into AI research, including TBD Lab, Meta’s secretive unit chasing superintelligence.Reality Labs has burned through more than $70 billion in losses since 2020, and consumers still haven’t rushed to buy VR headsets despite billions in development spending. The one bright spot has been the Ray-Ban smart glasses, which have sold over two million units and are now the centrepiece of Meta’s hardware strategy going forward.

The 5% performance cull that started it all

The whole performance-based layoff saga kicked off in January 2025, when Zuckerberg sent staff a memo saying he wanted to “raise the bar on performance management” and “move out low-performers faster.” An internal FAQ later suggested such cuts could become a yearly exercise. Meta cut roughly 5% of its workforce by February 2025, targeting employees rated as the lowest performers.Now, at least for 2026, Meta says that playbook is staying on the shelf.