Meta First Asked Employees to Work From Home — Then Sent Cold Layoff Emails at 4 AM: Internal Memo Leaked

Meta Platforms began cutting roughly 8,000 jobs on Wednesday, with employees in Singapore receiving termination emails at the odd hour of 4 a.m. local time, while the rest of the company's global workforce had been told to work from home ahead of their own notifications, Bloomberg News reported.

The layoffs affect about 10% of Meta's workforce, which stood at just under 78,000 at the end of March. Staff in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other regions were expected to receive word early in the morning in their respective time zones, with engineering and product teams bearing the brunt.

A leaked internal memo from Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer, framed the cuts as a direct consequence of the company's AI buildout. 'We're doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making,' Gale wrote.

Those investments are enormous. Meta has guided its 2026 capital expenditure to between $125 billion and $145 billion (£99 billion to £115 billion), with the majority earmarked for AI data centres, custom silicon, and model training. Analysts at Evercore estimate the layoffs will save roughly $3 billion (£2.4 billion) — a fraction of that spending.

Leaked Memo Explains Overhaul at Meta

The job losses are one component of a sweeping restructuring. Two days before the layoffs, Gale informed staff that 7,000 employees had been reassigned to newly formed AI teams. A further 6,000 open roles have been scrapped. Combined, the changes touch about 20% of Meta's headcount.

'As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles into their new org structures,' Gale wrote. '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.'

This is Meta's fourth round of job cuts in 2026, following earlier reductions in Reality Labs, recruiting and sales, Inc. noted. Additional layoffs could follow later in the year.

Snack Hoarding, Employee Surveillance, and Record Profits

The cuts land on the back of one of Meta's strongest quarters. The company posted $56.31 billion (£44.5 billion) in revenue and $26.8 billion (£21.2 billion) in net income in Q1 2026, up 33% year-on-year. Current and former employees described morale as deeply strained in reports by CNBC and WIRED. Median total compensation fell from $417,400 (£330,000) in 2024 to $388,200 (£307,000) last year, after two consecutive cuts to the stock component of annual raises.

Former employee Adel Wu described scenes ahead of earlier layoff rounds in a viral post on X, recalling workers stuffing bags with free office snacks, drinks, and chargers the night before cuts landed. 'My friends still there are either just waiting, hoping to get laid off or extremely anxious because the job is their lifeline,' she wrote.

Tensions have been compounded by the rollout of workplace surveillance. In April, Meta began deploying the Model Capability Initiative on US employees' laptops—software that captures keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and periodic screenshots across hundreds of apps to train AI agents. More than 1,000 staff signed a petition demanding it be scrapped.

'Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace,' the petition reads. 'It should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training.'

Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth confirmed there is no opt-out. European employees are exempt under GDPR.

Severance and the Oracle Parallel

US-based workers will receive 16 weeks of base salary plus two additional weeks for every year at the company, alongside 18 months of COBRA healthcare. Under California's WARN Act, roughly eight of those 16 weeks are legally mandated rather than discretionary.

The impersonal notification method echoes a growing pattern in the sector. In April, Oracle axed approximately 30,000 workers via a 6 a.m. email that told staff 'today is your last working day' before revoking system access. Both companies have framed the cuts as essential to funding AI infrastructure buildouts worth tens of billions of dollars.

At a company town hall in late April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg tied the cuts directly to AI costs and did not rule out further reductions before the end of the year. Meta has now eliminated more than 33,000 positions since 2022.

Across the wider technology sector, over 95,000 jobs have been shed in 2026 across 247 separate events.