Singapore among first hit as Meta launches major AI-driven layoffs affecting 8,000 workers

SINGAPORE: On Wednesday morning (May 20), Meta Platforms Inc began informing thousands of its employees that they were being retrenched. Beginning with its hub in Singapore, affected workers were notified at 4:00 a.m.

The tech giant owns several social media and social messaging apps, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and has a virtual reality arm as well.

Their counterparts in Europe and the United States are expected to receive notice during their respective early morning hours as well, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.  

The retrenchments come amid the company’s AI transformation. On Monday, Meta told its employees that 7,000 workers would be reassigned to roles involving artificial intelligence. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that this year, the company would be spending as much as US$135 billion (S$173 billion) on AI infrastructure “to train leading models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world”.

An internal memo from the company’s head of human resources, Janelle Gale, was quoted by the New York Times as saying that the affected employees would be shifted to four new organisations concentrating on developing new AI apps and tools, with more details promised to be revealed on May 20.

“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. We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding,” Ms Gale is said to have written in the memo.

In spite of record earnings for the first three months of 2026, Meta’s employees had already been informed in April that mass layoffs would be coming, with around 10% of the company’s 80,000 employees expected to be affected.

This particular round of retrenchments is said to affect the product and engineering divisions of Meta, and Bloomberg added that more layoffs could come in the latter part of 2026.

NYT added that most of Meta’s offices were reportedly empty on May 20, as Ms Gale had told employees to work from home. /TISG

Read also: Meta to begin first wave of layoffs on May 20, cutting about 8,000 jobs, with more layoffs expected later: Reports