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Mark Zuckerberg pulled the plug on a second wave of cuts that could have eliminated up to 60% of some teams, choosing instead to reassign thousands to AI roles.
Meta was preparing to gut its workforce by as much as 60% across certain teams. Then Mark Zuckerberg changed his mind.
The company originally mapped out two rounds of layoffs for 2026, one in May and another in November, as part of an aggressive push to rebuild Meta as an “AI-native” organization. The second wave got canceled before the first one even landed. What did land: roughly 8,000 employees lost their jobs on May 20, representing about 10% of Meta’s total headcount, while 6,000 open positions were quietly closed and approximately 7,000 workers were reassigned to AI-focused teams.
From 60% cuts to course correction #
The original plan was far more dramatic than what ultimately played out. Internal discussions had floated reductions of up to 60% in some teams, a figure that would have made Meta’s brutal 2022-2023 layoff cycle look like a gentle trim by comparison. That earlier period, which Zuckerberg branded the “Year of Efficiency,” eliminated over 21,000 roles.
This time, internal dissent helped pump the brakes. Employees pushed back, and the company hit unanticipated snags in its AI development timeline.
In a memo dated June 12, 2026, Zuckerberg acknowledged that mistakes had been made in executing the AI transformation. He also told employees that no further job cuts would take place for the remainder of the year.
Record profits, fewer people #
The financial backdrop makes this story more complicated than a simple “company in trouble cuts staff” narrative. Meta posted record Q1 2026 revenue of $56.3 billion, paired with net income of $26.8 billion.
The restructuring is less about saving money and more about reshaping how work gets done. Meta wants flatter teams with less managerial oversight, built around AI tools rather than traditional hierarchies.
The 7,000 reassignments tell that story clearly. Rather than showing those employees the door, Meta is retraining and repositioning them into roles that directly support its AI infrastructure and product development.
The efficiency playbook, version 2.0 #
Meta’s workforce contortions didn’t start in 2026. The company began its efficiency crusade in late 2022, when a pandemic-era hiring binge left it bloated and Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions were hemorrhaging cash. The 21,000 cuts that followed were painful but effective, at least by Wall Street’s metrics.
Where the 2022-2023 cuts were about fixing overstaffing, the 2026 restructuring is about something more fundamental: rebuilding the organizational chart around AI capabilities. Zuckerberg has been vocal about wanting Meta to operate with smaller, more autonomous teams that rely on AI for tasks previously handled by middle managers and support staff.
The canceled second wave of layoffs suggests Meta’s leadership discovered that you can’t simply swap humans for AI models on a spreadsheet and expect everything to work. AI tools still need human oversight, institutional knowledge doesn’t transfer to a language model, and employee morale matters when you’re asking thousands of people to learn entirely new roles under the threat of elimination.
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