Meta Platforms is said to be planning a wave of sweeping job cuts involving thousands of staff worldwide starting next month with more to follow later in the year.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram will lay off about 10 per cent of its global workforce, or close to 8,000 employees, in May’s initial round, with further job losses in the second half of the year, according to Reuters, although details of those cuts, including date and size, have not been settled.

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Meta declined to comment on the timing or scope of planned cuts. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and co-founder of the business, is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence as he seeks to reshape his company’s inner workings around the technology, reflecting a broader pattern among big US companies this year, particularly in the tech sector.

Amazon has cut 30,000 corporate employees in recent months, representing nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workers, while in February Block, the fintech company, dismissed nearly half of its staff, or about 4,000 jobs.

In both of those cases, executives tied the cuts to efficiency gains from artificial intelligence.

Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking tech job cuts around the world, reported that 73,212 employees have lost their jobs so far this year. For all of 2024, the figure was 153,000. Meta’s layoffs this year will be the social media group’s most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the “year of efficiency,” when it eliminated about 21,000 jobs.

At that time, Meta’s stock was falling sharply and the company was struggling to correct for Covid-era growth assumptions that ultimately proved unsustainable.

The company is in a more comfortable financial position this time, but executives envision a future of fewer management layers and greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

California-based Meta employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing.

In recent weeks, Meta has reorganized teams in its Reality Labs division and transferred engineers from throughout the company into a new Applied AI organization tasked with accelerating the development of AI agents that can write code and carry out complex tasks autonomously.