Nearly 80,000 Meta employees are headed into a bleak and gloomy week, as the tech giant announced it would be slashing its global workforce by 10%, laying off nearly 8,000 people total as the use of AI ramps up.
“I tend to cry in the shower. I will say that when I’m in office, I have on more of a brave face,” one Bay Area-based employee who has been with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s company for more than a decade told the San Francisco Standard anonymously. “I definitely spend a good amount of that time sort of despondent somewhere in my house.”
The employee noted the job has been “chaos,” as the company is gearing up to let go of thousands of workers on what is expected to be a Wednesday morning bloodbath — nearly 500 of those jobs are in the Bay Area’s concentrated tech sector. The wider tech culling is being referred to as the “AI job apocalypse.”
“I am generally dissatisfied with leadership and angry,” the longtime employee told the news website. “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job.”
One of the harshest realities for employees to digest is the fact that they do not find out they have been let go until it actually happens.
“If I get laid off, I’ll find out via an email sent at 7 a.m. to my personal email. By the time I get that email, I will already have lost access to all of my work accounts and everything internal,” the employee noted. “So if I am impacted, I won’t have any way to figure out who else was other than going on LinkedIn.”
Employees have had to get creative to figure out what is going on, given the lack of transparency about the layoffs.
The anonymous employee, an engineer, once created a spreadsheet tool to track employees’ layoff status — a resource they still keep privately.
They described Meta’s layoff process as impersonal, noting that workers often learn someone was let go only after checking their internal profile and seeing it marked “deactivated.”
The employee said working at Meta or in the tech industry is a tradeoff, and the bloodbath has been difficult.
“I feel torn. Working here is not easy,” they told the San Francisco website. “The pain of working here is not very well understood. It’s this grand calculus of what it costs to live in the Bay Area and what personal sacrifices you are willing to make and what you’re willing to do for money.”
The latest anticipated job cuts at Meta arrive amid a broader tech industry upheaval, where companies are aggressively shedding headcount to bankroll multi-billion-dollar pivots into artificial intelligence.
Across the sector, this industry-wide AI-driven restructuring has resulted in roughly 110,000 tech layoffs so far in 2026 alone — following 125,000 cuts in 2025 and a massive peak of more than 260,000 in 2023, CNBC reported.
Meta has been at the forefront of this downsizing. The upcoming elimination of 8,000 workers — plus the scrapping of 6,000 open roles — follows a targeted trim of more than 1,000 Reality Labs and content moderation positions earlier this year, adding to the staggering 21,000 employees the company originally let go during its 2022 and 2023 “Year of Efficiency” campaigns.
“My partner is home with our kids, so I’m currently the breadwinner, and it’s pretty intimidating to think that might disappear,” the employee, who is waiting to hear their fate Wednesday, noted.
This all comes as Meta accelerates its push into artificial intelligence, increasing its 2026 capital expenditure forecast last month by up to $10 billion, to a potential total of $145 billion.
“So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job,” the person added.
Meta has declined to comment to most news outlets about the layoffs and whether AI is playing a factor in workforce reduction evaluations. The California Post has reached out for comment.
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