Meta employees received their dismissal notice at 4 AM.

At exactly 4:00 AM on May 20th (local time), Meta began laying off 8,000 employees globally, starting in Singapore, as part of a restructuring effort to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the artificial intelligence race.

According to Bloomberg , Meta began sending layoff notices to thousands of employees on Wednesday morning (May 20). This is part of a restructuring plan aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs, while focusing significant resources on artificial intelligence (AI).

Meta is restructuring its workforce to focus resources on AI. Photo: Shutterstock

Singapore, Meta's hub in Asia, was the first to receive the notification at 4 a.m. According to internal memos, employees in Europe and the US would also receive the bad news in the early morning hours, according to their local time zones.

The company encouraged employees to work from home while implementing cuts to approximately 8,000 positions globally.

This round of layoffs is expected to have the strongest impact on the engineering and product teams. Prior to this, on May 18th, Meta announced the transfer of approximately 7,000 employees to newly formed teams focused entirely on AI initiatives, including product development and AI agents.

Meta's Chief Human Resources Officer, Janelle Gale, stated in the minutes: "We are at a stage where many organizations can operate with flatter structures, smaller teams are able to move faster and have greater autonomy. We believe this will make the company more productive."

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, mobilizing all resources to catch up with rivals like Google and OpenAI.

This has led to fundamental changes in operational practices, such as encouraging engineers to use AI to assist in coding; and planning to monitor employee equipment to improve technology.

Zuckerberg is even programming his own AI assistant to handle some of the CEO's executive tasks, such as gathering employee feedback.

These changes left Meta employees feeling frustrated and anxious. Over 1,000 people signed a petition to Zuckerberg demanding that he stop collecting data from personal devices, including details like keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen content, to train the AI.

On the market side, investors also expressed concern about Meta's "aggressive" spending on AI. While the company explained that the layoffs helped "offset" investment costs, analysts at Evercore estimated that the cuts would only save about $3 billion.

The $3 billion figure is just a small fraction of Meta's projected capital spending this year, which could reach $145 billion. The company also expects to spend hundreds of billions more on AI infrastructure between now and the end of the decade.

As of the end of March, Meta had nearly 80,000 employees before implementing these latest rounds of transfers and layoffs.

(According to Bloomberg)

According to cybersecurity expert Ngo Minh Hieu (Hieu PC), the removal of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps like Instagram exposes users to more sophisticated scams from cybercriminals.

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/nhan-vien-meta-nhan-thong-bao-sa-thai-luc-4h-sang-2517626.html