Meta has started cutting thousands of jobs with a focus on AI investment and efficiency. Mark Zuckerberg is targeting low performance. This is part of the move to lear operations across a wider industry, with some employees telling Business Insider they are worried about the changes.
The social media giant has taken a tough stance on low employee performance and is preparing its finances for a year of AI investment, Meta has begun to cut thousands of jobs . Employees affected in Europe, Asia and the US have started notifying us according to internal posts viewed by Business Insider.
The company says it will eliminate about 5% of its employees.
According to an internal memo seen by BI, the CEO told staff in January that they would “upload the bar” to “upload the bar” and move quickly to move quickly.
This is part of a broader push by the large tech companies to make themselves lean after employment during the pandemic. Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and others collectively eliminate thousands of employees.
Zuckerberg was on the forefront of this, unveiling the “Year of Efficiency” in 2023, which lasted from last year until 2025. Wall Street has rewarded this new focus meta, bringing the company’s stock soaring since its launch in 2023. Run has added over $1 trillion to Meta’s market valuation.
Meta continues to remain profitable throughout the recent period of large employment and large spending, but the company is currently competing to keep up with its rivals in the nordic race. This requires billions of dollars of infrastructure and related investments. It could probably be putting pressure on Zuckerberg to ask for cost savings elsewhere.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment.
Impact on some employees
According to two people familiar with the issue, Meta offers US-affected workers a retirement package that includes a 16-week salary and an additional two weeks of each year of service.
For some meta employees, efficient drives are causing anxiety. These staff asked not to identify any sensitive topics not to be discussed.
“Mark is creating fear,” a Meta employee told BI. “He creates a culture where you have to be loyal if you are not.”
Another employee said that working for Meta now “feels like living in a George Orwell novel.”
Even a colleague who played well said, “It was gone all year round, and when you asked about it, you were just told, ‘They’re not with the company anymore,'” the person said . “Self-censorship is rampant. In a company dedicated to connecting people, the human side of our work has disappeared, and everyone is acting more robotically.”
Another meta employee said reductions should not be branded as performance-based reductions as they could undermine people’s reputations for other opportunities.
“Now, people have to return to the job market with incredibly unfair labels,” the person added.
They expressed concern that good employees will be cut only to meet quotas, and that this could have a negative impact on morale.
“If they’re just going to rank us and do all this again next year, what incentive will help new recruits rise?” the person added.
How Meta’s latest job openings work
Jobcut is designed to target employees who have been rated “several met” or “unmet” in performance reviews, in the lower two categories of the meta rating system.
Internal guidance obtained last month by BI says managers must identify between 12% and 15% of employees eligible for these ratings. Meta aims to reach 10% “non-resurrectable exhaustion” by combining these cuts with previous departures. For example, if a team had 5% attrition in 2024, the manager would need to identify between 7% and 10% of employees for bottom ratings to meet the target.
One Meta employee told BI that forced managers to place team members in the bottom category for job cuts spread concerns not only to rank and file but also to managed ranks.
On Friday, employees received a memo from Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources at Meta, detailing how the process works. The memo, obtained by BI, stated that affected employees will be notified through their work or personal email addresses and will lose access to the corporate system within an hour of being notified. They added that they will receive information about the retirement package in the same email.
Notifications are shifted by time zone, with employees in the Asia-Pacific region first being notified, followed by employees in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and finally, North and Latin America.
Employees from European countries such as Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands are exempt from this process due to local regulations and instead follow the local performance management process, the memo says. Meta added that he intends to fill these roles, but plans and timelines “may be different.”
How the meta is reorganized
In the cut, the social media giant is reorganizing some of its businesses and divisions.
The company has integrated Facebook and the Messenger team under Facebook Chief Tom Alison, but Loredana Crisan, head of Messenger, is planning to move to the generation group, the information says.
Meta’s reality lab division, which has lost nearly $60 billion since 2020, is more closely integrated with Meta’s major businesses, turning back some of Zuckerberg’s 2021 restructuring. In an internal memo obtained by BI, Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Reality Labs, said Reality Labs has “became a positive driver for Meta’s overall brand.”
