Surveillance First, Severance Next: Meta Tracked Workers to Train AI, Then Cut 8,000 Jobs

Meta layoffs deepen as AI push grows, with employee tracking claims and 8,000 job cuts raising fresh concerns.

Meta Layoffs 2026: Employees Allege Quiet Job Cuts Amid AI Push

Source : X/@BRICSinfo

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Key points generated by AI, verified by newsroom

• Around 8,000 employees impacted by AI restructuring, others moved.

Before Meta announced layoffs affecting nearly 10 per cent of its global workforce this week, the company had reportedly been monitoring employee activity through an internal tracking tool. According to reports, the system recorded mouse movements and keystrokes on work devices to help generate training data for Meta’s artificial intelligence models. The company reportedly believed that observing experienced engineers at work could provide better-quality AI training data than other available methods.

More than 1,000 employees reportedly signed a petition opposing the monitoring practice. Despite the concerns raised by staff, the layoffs still went ahead.

Meta Layoffs 2025: Work From Home, Then The Emails

On the day the layoffs began, employees in several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, were instructed to work from home instead of coming to the office. There were no company-wide meetings or public announcements about the job cuts. In Singapore, affected employees reportedly received termination emails early in the morning.

The notifications were sent out in phases across different time zones. Many employees noticed the sequence of events, first being asked to stay home, followed by the layoffs, and felt it was done to keep the process low-profile and avoid attention.

Why Meta Is Cutting Jobs: The AI Restructuring Explained

Meta had roughly 78,000 employees before the exercise began. The current round affects about 8,000 people. Separately, around 7,000 employees are being moved into newly formed AI-focused teams, and approximately 6,000 open positions have been closed. The company is also reducing managerial layers, with engineering and product roles expected to bear the brunt of the cuts.

Further reductions may follow later in the year. Meta has said it plans to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion this year, with AI as the central focus.

Meta Job Cuts And The Wider Tech Layoff Wave

Meta is not alone. Cisco cut 4,000 jobs last week. Microsoft, Amazon, Disney and ASML have all announced job reductions or voluntary exit programmes in recent months. In April, Oracle laid off an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 employees, also through early-morning emails sent across geographies. The pattern points to something wider than any single company's strategy: a broad reconfiguration of how large technology firms are thinking about the relationship between their headcount and their AI ambitions.