The planned mass layoffs at Meta, which have loomed over its employees for weeks, are now just days away.
Since Meta first announced the coming layoffs on April 23, employees have been working in a state of limbo, unsure of who among them will end up out of work.
Meta said at the time in an internal memo that it would cut about 10% of its 78,000 employees and about 6,000 open roles on May 20. Meta said the job cuts would help the company run "more efficiently" and offset investments.
"I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity, which is incredibly unsettling," Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer, said in the April memo.
Staffers who spoke to Business Insider agreed.
"It's a bit surreal that 1 out of 10 people are about to be hit, and no one knows how the lists are being made," one Meta employee said. "It feels like people are just in a holding pattern waiting for Wednesday."
They said some employees are close to securing job offers from other companies and are hoping they'll get cut so they can also collect the severance. The uncertainty has left people just "waiting around."
"This won't be the last time it happens, so there's also this feeling that as much as it sucks, it's the new normal," the employee said.
Adel Wu, a former Meta employee, described a similar scene in an X post on Friday. "my friends still there are either just waiting hoping to get laid off or extremely anxious because the job is their lifeline," she wrote.
As the day inches closer, another Meta worker said many large empty boxes appeared in some of the company's Menlo Park offices. While they weren't told why the boxes were there, it seemed like an ominous sign.
"I'm speculating that they are to dump the items after the 20th," they said.
Meta did not immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment.
Head count down, AI spend up
Meta, like other major Big Tech companies, is spending billions to secure a leading position in the AI race. In January, the company forecast its 2026 capex spending to range from $115 billion to $135 billion. Meta has also made strategic acquisitions to secure top talent, including Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Meta spent about $15 billion to purchase a 49% stake in the company. Wang now heads the company's Superintelligence Lab.
Meta is among a raft of tech companies that have announced layoffs in recent months, including Amazon, Coinbase, and Block. It's also not the only one to put employees into a layoff limbo — GitLab and ASML similarly announced intentions to cut staff ahead of time.
In addition to pending layoffs, a new policy inside Meta to track employees' keystrokes and mouse movements is also causing unease among some of the workforce. The new software is being used to train the company's AI models. Some employees have been distributing flyers across Meta offices and bathrooms protesting the software, according to an employee who saw them.
In March, Meta announced it would establish an Applied AI group to further accelerate its push into superintelligence. One Meta staffer said a large number of data engineers and data scientists were drafted into that organization, gutting other departments. This staffer described the new team's tasks as "Mercor-like data labeling," referring to the AI training startup.
