Wednesday morning. 4 am. Your email pings.
It’s the notification. Meta is cutting 10% of its 80,00-strong workforce. Nearly 8,000 jobs, gone before breakfast.
The panic has been building all week. Offices in Menlo Park and New York are ghost towns. People aren’t coding. They aren’t attending meetings. They’re polishing their résumés, commiserating offsite, or sitting in silence. The vibe? Paralyzed. Coastin’ it out. Panicked.
Why rush now? Perks.
Everyone is scraping every last cent out of their benefits bucket. There is an annual $2,00 flexible spending allowance. Gone. The triennial $200 credit for audio gear? Gone too. Apple AirPods and headphones are flying off virtual shelves. Why let that money evaporate when you might lose your paycheck on Wednesday?
One thing is clear: this isn’t about efficiency in the traditional sense.
Meta is making record profits. Record high profits. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp—the engines are roaring. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants cash. Lots of it. He says it needs to be poured into AI data centers. He claims AI can augment human labor so effectively that we just don’t need as many humans.
Does that sit right? Probably not.
Morale inside Meta has sunk to unprecedented lows. It’s not just the impending cuts. It’s the forced transfers. It’s the surveillance software. Employees report being drafted onto AI teams against their will. Meanwhile, corporate software tracks every keystroke and mouse movement of US workers.
The tracking isn’t for security. It’s to train the very AI models that might eventually replace the trackers.
Some find the irony deafening.
The restructuring is broader than just firing people. Reuters reports 7,000 other employees will be shuffled into “AI initiatives.” Managers are becoming individual contributors again. The total impact hits 20% of the workforce. Laid off or repurposed. WIRED confirmed it independently.
What are the remaining workers doing?
Checking their pay stubs. Saving performance reviews. Building digital graveyards for their employment tenure. Teams are meeting at bars Tuesday night, drinking away the uncertainty. Management actually told people: stay home Wednesday. Don’t bother coming in.
It’s surreal.
A company this wealthy, treating its own workforce like disposable hardware to be upgraded. The anxiety isn’t new—three large layoffs since 2021—but the AI context changes everything. Society is already terrified that machines will eat jobs. Meta is handing it a tray of appetizers.
Meta hasn’t responded to comment requests. The silence speaks volumes.
Who’s left? Those who survive. Those who got transferred. Those who watched their colleagues disappear by 4 am next week. The office might fill up again. The Slack channels will chime.
But nothing is the same.
Not really.
