Meta's biggest-ever layoffs may start soon; HR sends employees email asking them to...

Meta appears to be days away from its largest round of job cuts in company history. On Tuesday night, employees in the wearables and ads divisions received HR emails directing them to work remotely on Wednesday, with a note that leadership would share more information. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. Business Insider, which first reported the remote work directive, cited two sources who received the email.

The timing is notable. Meta's wearables unit—which covers AI glasses and its augmented reality business—was described in the company's latest earnings report as one of its "key investment areas" for 2026. Getting told to stay home the day layoffs are expected to drop is not a coincidence.

Up to 20% of Meta's 79,000 employees could be cut, and that's roughly 16,000 jobs

Reuters reported earlier this month that Meta is planning cuts affecting 20% or more of its workforce. With nearly 79,000 employees on the books as of end-2025, that translates to roughly 15,800 jobs — surpassing the twin waves of the 2022–23 "year of efficiency," when Meta cut 11,000 jobs in November and another 10,000 the following spring. In January, it had already trimmed 1,500 from Reality Labs. This time, the cuts would be the deepest in the company's history.

Meta is spending $600 billion on AI infrastructure, and trimming headcount to pay for it

The reasoning is straightforward, if brutal. Meta has committed $600 billion to build out data centres by 2028, with 2026 capex projected as high as $135 billion. It's also handing out pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to lure top AI researchers to its superintelligence team, led by Alexandr Wang, formerly of Scale AI. To finance those bets without rattling Wall Street, the company is pulling the most obvious lever: headcount. Zuckerberg said as much in January, noting he was already seeing "projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person."

The urgency is compounded by internal turbulence. Meta's new frontier model, codenamed Avocado, has reportedly fallen short on reasoning and coding benchmarks and been pushed back to May. Before that, it shelved Llama 4 Behemoth entirely. With billions committed and a new AI engineering org running manager-to-employee ratios of 1:50, Meta is clearly betting on a leaner, AI-native future—and the people who built the old one may not have a seat in it.