The layoffs will see 10% of its workforce being laid off, but there has been no news as to how the tech giant’s 1,800 workers in Ireland will be impacted.
Last month, the alarm was raised after the company said it would not fill thousands of open jobs it had been hiring for.
Reuters reports the cuts will be accompanied by a fresh round of organizational changes aimed at improving the company’s artificial intelligence workflows.
Meta detailed its layoff plans for this week in a memo shared with employees on Monday.
The Facebook owner is reportedly planning additional deep cuts slated to come later this year.
In a memo to staff issued earlier this week, Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale told employees the company plans to move 7,000 workers to new initiatives related to AI workflows and to eliminate managerial roles.
The cuts come as Meta massively increases spending on AI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said that 2026 would be the year that AI starts to transform the way the company works, with investments in AI tools that would involve "flattening teams".
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"We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person," Mr. Zuckerberg said in January.
But in a sign of growing internal unrest, more than 1,000 employees have signed a petition decrying the installation of mouse-tracking software for use in training Meta’s artificial intelligence models to help them replicate how humans interact with computers.
Meta employees have also been protesting the moves with flyers at the company’s offices and in angry posts on its internal communications platform, Workplace.
In March, it was reported that 15 jobs were under threat at the company’s Irish operation linked to the adoption of AI.
Irish-based Meta staff were also hit by a redundancy announcement in January last year, when the company said it would cut around 5% of its ‘lowest performing’ staff globally.
The company previously cut around 840 jobs in Ireland, with rounds of redundancies in November 2022 and again in May 2023.
Headcount at the social media giant was 77,986 employees at the end of March, according to company filings.
* This article was originally published on Extra.ie.
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