Meta cuts 8K jobs worldwide, Singapore staff wake to 4AM termination e-mails

Staff are encouraged to work from home amid the layoffs

Meta is laying off around 8,000 employees globally, as part of a restructuring aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs as the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), Bloomberg reported.

The tech giant sent out emails in Singapore at 4AM local time on Wednesday (May 20) to employees who were being laid off. Workers in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere are expected to be notified early morning on the same day in their respective time zones.

In the meantime, staff are being encouraged to work from home while the company proceeds with its layoffs.

This round of cuts targets Meta’s engineering and product teams in particular, and more layoffs could follow later in 2026, people familiar with the plans said, asking not to be named as the information isn’t public.

Just two days prior, Meta announced in an internal memo circulated that some 7,000 workers have been reassigned to newly formed teams that are focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents.

The company had just under 80,000 employees at the end of Mar—before reassignments and layoffs—and has committed well over US$100 billion (S$128 billion) to AI capital expenditures in 2026.

“We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” Meta’s head of people Janelle Gale said in the memo, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News. “We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding.”

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made AI Meta’s top priority, committing all resources to keeping pace with rivals like Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI. That focus is reshaping the workforce and operations.

The company has weathered waves of layoffs in recent years as Zuckerberg pushes for efficiency. He has urged engineers to use AI agents for coding and other tasks, outlined plans to track employee devices to improve the technology, and even built his own AI-powered assistant to handle some CEO duties—like soliciting employee feedback.

The changes have left Meta employees frustrated and anxious. More than a thousand signed a petition to Zuckerberg and other leaders demanding the company stop collecting device data—including keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen content—to train AI. Others have taken to social media to vent about how layoff threats have hit morale and work.

Meta’s aggressive AI spending has rattled investors, who question whether the investment will pay off. While Meta has framed the layoffs as a way to “offset” major AI costs, Evercore analysts estimate the cuts will save only about US$3 billion.

That is a fraction of Meta’s projected 2026 capital expenditures—up to US$145 billion—and the hundreds of billions more it anticipates spending on AI infrastructure before the decade’s end.

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