Meta will cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing staff, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed employees of the decision to “move out low-performing employees faster” in a memo posted to the company’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday. Zuckerberg told his employees that 2025 will be “an intense year.”
The company specified that it is “exiting approximately 5% of our worst-performing employees” in a separate message posted by a company director. Meta has more than 72,000 employees, according to its most recent quarterly report.
Meta said employees affected by the layoffs will be notified by Feb. 10 and will receive compensation in accordance with what the company previously provided. The cuts represent Meta’s largest layoffs since it eliminated 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Bloomberg was the first to report the cuts, citing an internal memo.
The move follows several major operational changes within Meta aimed at building closer ties with President-elect Donald Trump.
Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a “Community Notes” model used on Elon Musk’s X platform, where individual users provide more context to posts.
“The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point toward once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going back to our roots and focusing on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said Zuckerberg in a video ad.
Below is Zuckeberg’s internal memo, which was obtained by CNBC.
Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies in the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social networks. This is going to be an intense year and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams.
I’ve decided to raise the bar for performance management and get low-performing employees out faster. We typically manage people who do not meet expectations over the course of a year, but we are now making more extensive performance-based cuts over this cycle, with the intention of refilling these roles in 2025. We will not manage everyone who did not meet expectations during the last period if we are optimistic about their future performance, and for those we lay off, we will provide generous severance in line with what we provided with previous cuts.
We will follow up with more guidance for managers before calibrations. Affected individuals will be notified on February 10 or later for those outside the US.
