As Meta braces for a challenging week, nearly 80,000 employees are facing uncertainty with the company’s decision to reduce its global workforce by 10%. This move, driven by the increasing role of AI, will result in approximately 8,000 layoffs.
“I often find myself crying in the shower, but at work, I try to maintain a brave face,” shared a Bay Area employee who has been with Mark Zuckerberg’s company for over ten years, speaking anonymously to the San Francisco Standard. “I spend a lot of time feeling despondent at home.”
The employee described the work environment as chaotic, with the company poised to cut thousands of jobs in what is anticipated to be a significant layoff event on Wednesday morning. Around 500 of these job cuts are expected to hit the tech-heavy Bay Area. This broader trend has been dubbed the “AI job apocalypse.”
“I’m generally unhappy with the leadership and quite angry,” the long-serving employee expressed to the news outlet. “I’ve never felt this anxious and stressed in a job before.”
One of the toughest aspects for employees is the abrupt nature of the layoffs, as they are only informed once it happens.
“If I’m laid off, I’ll be notified through a 7 a.m. email sent to my personal account. By then, I’ll have already lost access to all work-related accounts,” the employee explained. “If affected, my only way to find out who else was is by checking 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 multibillion-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,” noted the employee, who is waiting to hear their fate Wednesday.
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.
