As the sun rose, identical pre-set emails containing layoff notices took off from Menlo Park to be forwarded to thousands of inboxes of as many (former) Meta employees, the American Big Tech company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, currently grappling with heavy expenses for Artificial Intelligence (to win over Donald Trump, it had to promise him the monstrous investment of $600 billion in American data centers). Hence, the need to tighten the purse strings and return to massive layoffs, despite steadily growing financials.
THE FLOOD OF LAYOFF EMAILS
This is the story – which at times seems like science fiction, centered on a dystopian future – that appeared in the pages of the New York Times: the first to receive the news were employees at the Singapore offices, with an email at 4 a.m. informing them, we can imagine, to collect their personal belongings and hand over their badges at the guardhouse by the end of the day.
But the sun kept rising meanwhile, and with our star, the layoff letters traveled through the ether. In the following hours, the same communication landed on the devices of employees in Italy, then in the UK, and finally in the United States. A total of 8,000 positions cut in a single morning. The Menlo Park Big Tech company had over 78,000 employees at the end of 2025 and after this latest cut settles globally at about 70,000.
LAYOFFS ALSO IN ITALY
As anticipated, the axe from Menlo Park also fell on our country, mostly in Milan. The local newspaper Il Giorno writes: “Meta has opened a collective layoff procedure that foresees cutting 33 jobs in Italy, mainly in Milan. A decision, according to union sources, that translates into a reduction of about one-third of the workforce in our country, where the social media giant currently counts about a hundred employees.”
THE RACE TO LEAD IN AI
At the same time, another 6,000 open positions were closed. Beyond the cuts, about 7,000 employees will be hurriedly moved to departments dealing with Artificial Intelligence, because the race is being played on that front and Meta, as is known, finds itself alongside Apple and Google having to chase the leaders, namely Anthropic of the Amodei brothers and OpenAI of Altman.
ZUCKERBERG’S WORDS
“Artificial intelligence is the most important technology of our era,” Mark Zuckerberg, former Silicon Valley prodigy who seems to have lost his touch for some time now, considering the billions spent on the metaverse (complete with rebranding to Meta) and on the failed augmented reality headsets, reportedly wrote to his former employees.
The Cnbc, which viewed the email sent to the personal inboxes of the laid-off, claims that the Facebook founder tried to justify the current frenzy regarding AI: “The companies that blaze the trail will define the next generation.”
MORE CUTS IN AUGUST?
“We are transforming our company to ensure it is always the best place for talented people to have the greatest impact,” but meanwhile, a new wave of layoffs – according to press rumors – is already scheduled and expected in August. No one at Meta will have a peaceful vacation this year.
Those who remain do not seem satisfied, to put it mildly, with the new internal monitoring to feed the data produced by employees to AI. It is unclear whether in doing so human workers are unwillingly training the algorithms that will then replace them in a sort of man-machine handover, but what workers especially dislike is the feeling of being constantly monitored, with the fear that those who are not efficient enough could be the next recipients of the dawn email.
THE NUMBERS KEEP SWELLING
All this while in Menlo Park Mark Zuckerberg celebrates the latest record quarter: revenues at $48.7 billion with a 34% leap and net profit at $18.9 billion (in this case an advance of 54%), with an operating margin of 44% and Family DAP at $3.45 billion. The 2026 capex has been revised upward to a range between $42 and $48 billion.
