Meta layoffs have started. As widely speculated, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta began laying off hundreds of employees Wednesday, March 25. As per reports, Meta layoffs are said to be part of a larger company reorganization. The cuts will impact employees in the U.S. and other international markets. Earlier this month, Meta reportedly asked some managers to prepare cost-cutting plans. Also, some Meta employees in the company’s wearables and ads units received a message on Tuesday, March 24, instructing them to work from home on Wednesday. This led to speculation that layoffs are coming very soon. Commenting on layoffs, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement, “Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve ‌their ⁠goals. Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted.” The layoffs will also reportedly affect employees across Meta’s recruiting, sales, global operations and Facebook social teams. The job cuts across these divisions are reportedly unrelated to one another. While most of the impacted workers were notified Wednesday, others might be informed in the coming weeks, depending on circumstances such as location. Some employees are being offered new roles, while others may have the option to relocate. The layoffs mark the second time Meta has trimmed its workforce in 2026. In January, Meta laid off 10% of its staff in the Reality Labs division. The new job cuts will affect fewer than 1,000 employees. Meta employed nearly 79,000 workers as of December, a 6% increase year-over-year.

Making for rise in Meta’s capital expenditure

The Facebook parent is seeking to offset rising ⁠costs tied to massive investments in artificial intelligence, having forecast total expenses of $162 billion to $169 billion in 2026, and rising employee compensation ⁠as the company spends millions to hire top AI talent.Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg signaled more investment and a shift toward greater reliance on AI. In a January Facebook post following the announcement of the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results, Zuckerberg said that AI is going to make a significant impact on the business in 2026. “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” he said.

Mark Zuckerberg’s January Facebook post where he hinted ‘job cuts are coming’

I just shared Meta’s quarterly earnings report. We had strong business performance in 2025 and I’m looking forward to advancing personal superintelligence for people around the world in 2026. Here’s the transcript of what I said on the call:We ended 2025 strong with more than 3.5 billion people now using at least one of our apps every day. That includes more than 2 billion daily actives each on Facebook and WhatsApp — and just shy of that on Instagram. Our business also performed very well thanks to record-breaking holiday demand and AI-driven performance gains.We are now seeing a major AI acceleration. I expect 2026 to be a year where this wave accelerates even further on several fronts. We’re starting to see agents really work. This will unlock the ability to build completely new products and transform how we work.In ’25 we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program. Over the coming months we’re going to start shipping our new models and products. I expect our first models will be good but, more importantly, will show the rapid trajectory that we’re on. And then I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models.I’m very excited about the products we’re building. Our vision is building personal superintelligence. We’re starting to see the promise of AI that understands our personal context, including our history, our interests, our content, and our relationships. A lot of what makes agents valuable is the unique context that they can see, and we believe that Meta will be able to provide a uniquely personal experience.We’re also working on merging LLMs with the recommendation systems that power Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and our ads system. Our world class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business, but we think the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon. Today our systems help people stay in touch with friends, understand the world, and find interesting and entertaining content. But soon, we’ll be able to understand people’s unique personal goals, and tailor feeds to show each person content that helps them improve their lives in the ways that they want. This also has implications for commerce. Our ads today help businesses find just the right very specific people who are interested in their products. New agentic shopping tools will allow people to find just the right very specific set of products from the businesses in our catalogue. We’re focused on making these experiences work across both our feeds and across business messaging — significantly increasing the capabilities of WhatsApp over time.New kinds of content will soon be possible as well. People want to express themselves and experience the world in the most immersive and interactive ways possible. We started with text, and then moved to photos when we got phones with cameras, and then moved to video when mobile networks got fast enough. Soon we’ll see an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive, and only possible because of advances in AI.Our feeds will become more interactive overall. Today our apps feel like algorithms that recommend content. Soon, you’ll open our apps and you’ll have an AI that understands you, and also happens to be able to show you great content or even generate great personalized content for you. Glasses are the ultimate incarnation of this vision. They’re going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you and help you as you go about your day, and even show you information or generate custom UI right there in your vision. Sales of our glasses more than tripled last year, and we think that they’re some of the fastest growing consumer electronics in history. Billions of people wear glasses or contacts for vision correction. I think we’re at a moment similar to when smartphones arrived, and it was clearly only a matter of time until all those flip phones became smartphones. It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses aren’t AI glasses.For Reality Labs, we’re directing most of our investment towards glasses and wearables going forward, while focusing on making Horizon a massive success on mobile and making VR a profitable ecosystem over the coming years. I expect Reality Labs losses this year to be similar to last year, and this will likely be the peak as we start to gradually reduce our losses going forward while continuing to execute on our vision.As we plan for the future, we will continue to invest very significantly in infrastructure to train leading models and deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world. I recently announced Meta Compute with the belief that being the most efficient at how we engineer, invest, and partner to build our infrastructure will become a strategic advantage. Dina Powell McCormick also joined us as President and Vice Chairman, and she will lead our efforts to partner with governments, sovereigns, and strategic capital partners to expand our long-term capacity, including ensuring positive economic impact in the communities that we operate in around the world. An important part of Meta Compute will be making long term investments in silicon and energy. We will continue working with key partners while advancing our own silicon program. We’re architecting our systems so that we can be flexible in the systems we use, and we expect the cost per gigawatt to decrease significantly over time through optimizing both our technology and supply chain.The last thing I want to mention is that I think 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work. As we navigate this, our north star is building the best place for individuals to make a massive impact. So to do this, we’re investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done, we’re elevating individual contributors, and flattening teams. We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person. I want to make sure as many of these very talented people as possible choose Meta as the place they can make the greatest impact — to deliver personalized products to billions of people around the world. And if we do this, then I think we’ll get a lot more done and it’s going to be a lot more fun.Alright, that’s everything I wanted to cover. This is going to be a big year for delivering personal superintelligence, accelerating our business, building infrastructure for the future, and shaping how our company will work going forward. As always, I’m grateful for all of the hard work of our teams and to all of you for being on this journey with us.