Facebook and Instagram owner Meta 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.
The memo confirms rumors that were first reported by Reuters on Sunday, April 19.
The first round of widespread layoffs is scheduled for May 20, while the second round is scheduled for the second half of the year, according to three sources who spoke to Reuters, as the company aims to reduce its workforce by 20%.
These layoffs follow a trend in the tech industry, which has seen a huge 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 is unclear which of Meta’s 90 global offices will be affected by the layoffs. According to documents shared with the federal government, at the end of 2025, Metra employed 78,865 people worldwide.
USA TODAY contacted Meta for comment on the widespread layoffs, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Transfer of Meta to AI
At the beginning of the year, Meta announced it would be laying off approximately 1,500 employees, or about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, as the company shifted from its Metaverse business model to its Meta Superintelligence Labs.
In April, META unveiled the “Muse Spark” family of artificial intelligence models, which were expected to compete with already established AI models such as Gemini 3.1, created by Google, and GPT 5.4, created by OpenAI.
This announcement stems from Meta’s focus on creating natively coded artificial intelligence in 2025. The company had lagged behind in the AI race as Meta had put most of its investments into the metaverse. Meta initially invested $10 billion in the company to finance its research into new technologies. However, the company’s fourth quarter 2024 earnings revealed that Meta had lost more than $60 billion in operating costs.
But with the failure of the metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg started investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI.
“We are at an exciting point for our company, where we have the opportunity to continue improving our core services today, as well as creating new AI-powered experiences and services that will change the way people engage with our products in the future,” Meta said in its 2025 third quarter report. “Next year we will be able to continue strong revenue growth into 2026, while our progress on AI models and products will enable us to capitalize on new revenue opportunities in the years to come.”