Meta Mass Layoffs: Singapore Employees Receive Termination Emails at 4 a.m.

Meta Platforms has begun laying off around 8,000 employees globally as part of a major transformation toward an artificial intelligence (AI) era. The wave of layoffs began in Singapore on Wednesday, 20 May, when a number of employees received termination emails at about 4:00 a.m. local time, according to Business Times. Employees in the UK, the United States, and other countries are also scheduled to receive notices in the morning according to their time zones. The layoffs are part of a major restructuring to boost efficiency while redirecting company resources toward AI development. The number of affected staff is estimated to be around 10 percent of the total workforce. Then on Monday this week, the company announced that around 7,000 more employees would be moved to a new team focused on AI development, including products and AI agents. The company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is believed to have fewer than 80,000 employees at the end of March, prior to the relocation and layoffs. According to sources familiar with the plan, the latest round of layoffs is primarily targeting engineering and product teams. Additional layoffs could still occur by the end of the year. Meta’s Chief People Officer Janelle Gale, in an internal memo, said the company now aims to build a flatter organisational structure with smaller teams so they can move faster. ‘We are now at a stage where many organisations can operate with a flatter structure, with small pods/cohorts that can move faster and take on greater responsibility,’ Gale wrote in the memo verified by Bloomberg News. ‘We believe this will make us more productive and the work more rewarding,’ she added. This year, Meta has committed to investing more than $100 billion in AI, with total capital expenditure expected to reach between $125 billion and $145 billion. This large investment is intended to accelerate AI technology development to compete with companies such as Alphabet and OpenAI.