Record profits. Falling morale. Next week, Meta begins cutting roughly 10% of its workforce - tens of thousands of people at a company with around 74,000 employees globally.
Wired spoke with more than a dozen current and former Meta employees for a detailed account published today. The phrase that keeps surfacing: "everyone is unhappy." That contrast - a financially healthy company with a demoralized workforce - is the central tension in the piece.
The cuts don't appear to be driven by financial pressure. Meta has been vocal about its AI ambitions, with planned infrastructure spending of $60-65 billion in 2025. The reductions are instead part of an ongoing restructuring that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been building since 2022, when the company began aggressively thinning management layers and sharpening performance review processes to push out lower performers. What's notable about this round is that it's happening while Meta is simultaneously expanding its AI product surface - Meta AI is now embedded in WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and the Ray-Ban smart glasses. The AI teams appear largely insulated from the cuts. Supporting functions and management layers are absorbing most of the reductions.
For users of Meta's products, the near-term impact is probably minimal. But the morale picture matters for longer-term product quality. Sustained uncertainty tends to affect retention of the people who have the most options - and those are usually the people building the things users actually care about.