Meta Drops the Other Shoe, Announces Thousands of Layoffs for Next Month ⇥ ft.com

Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

Meta will cut 10 per cent of its staff next month, or about 8,000 jobs, as the social media platform reduces its workforce to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s AI spending spree.

[…]

Meta also said that it was no longer filling 6,000 positions that it had initially planned to hire for, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Not the 20% reported by Reuters last month, but a huge number nevertheless. This is in addition to a thousand people laid off in January and hundreds more in March. That is a lot of lives upended — a lot of people who relocated, made plans, bought houses, and made commitments they might no longer be able to fulfill — because Meta hired too aggressively, and is now running a “marvel of financial engineering” to build data centres.