After 8,000 layoffs, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a 'confession' to employees

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits "mistakes" in AI overhaul memo, promises no more 2026 layoffs after 8,000 job cuts

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a problem he can't memo his way out of. A month after Meta cut 8,000 jobs and reassigned another 7,000 people to AI work, morale inside the company sits at record lows, and the CEO's latest attempt to steady the ship landed with a thud.

In an internal note seen by Reuters on Friday, Zuckerberg conceded that Meta has fumbled parts of its AI transformation and promised no more company-wide layoffs this year.Then came the caveat that swallowed the reassurance. He didn't want to overpromise, Zuckerberg wrote, because the world is changing in ways out of his control. For the 70,000 employees still logged in—many of them watching colleagues get pulled into AI training work they didn't ask for—that hedge is the part that sticks.

A no-layoffs pledge with an expiry date isn't really a pledge, and after a month of 4 a.m. termination emails, people have learned to read the fine print.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits Meta "made mistakes" in its AI overhaul

The memo's striking feature was its tone of admission. "Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," Zuckerberg wrote, according to Reuters. He paired that with a pledge to provide "as much stability as possible" going forward, while reiterating that Meta does not expect further mass cuts in 2026.

He also acknowledged employee anger over the company's "managers managing managers" purge—the May 20 layoffs hit engineering managers hardest—and said Meta would scale back the practice of stretching one manager across as many as 50 reports.The restructuring he's apologising for was brutal in its specifics. The cuts amounted to 10 percent of Meta's global workforce, with notifications rolling out in three 4 a.m.

waves across Asia, Europe and the Americas. US staff received 16 weeks of severance plus two weeks per year served. The 7,000 reassigned employees were funnelled into new AI teams, including a unit called Applied AI and Engineering, which staff have taken to calling "the Draft" because joining wasn't optional.

Inside Meta, the AI grunt work is "soul-crushing"

The discontent isn't abstract. Wired reported that a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week was interrupted by an expletive-laden outburst, with one worker demanding the hosts tell a specific AI executive he's "a piece of shit."

Engineers reassigned to Applied AI describe the new tasks—generating coding puzzles to train and test AI models—as menial. One called it "literally the gulag." Another told Wired the work felt "soul-crushing" for people hired to build apps for billions of users.Zuckerberg tried to reframe that unit in his memo, casting it as a waypoint rather than a dead end. The work, he argued, lets "very talented people" contribute while Meta builds other roles for them over the coming months.

He also stressed that, unlike some rivals, automating away jobs isn't Meta's main goal—the company wants more personalised Instagram and Facebook experiences, smarter glasses, and personal AI agents.

The $145 billion bill driving every cut at Meta

Underneath the personnel drama sits a staggering number. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to between $125 billion and $145 billion—nearly double last year's spend—with most of it going to data centres, custom chips and model training for Meta Superintelligence Labs.

The 8,000 layoffs were explicitly meant to offset that bill. CFO Susan Li told analysts in April she no longer has a clean answer for what Meta's ideal headcount looks like, given how fast AI is reshaping what one engineer can ship.Zuckerberg's fixes for morale read as modest against that backdrop. He promised bigger budgets for offsites and team events, assigned desks for many employees by year's end, and a large hackathon in July to rebuild cross-team collaboration.

The hackathon idea flopped immediately. "I'm literally preoccupied with keeping the lights on for my team," one employee wrote in comments quoted by Wired. "I have no incentive to participate, let alone have the time to do so.

" Another doubted the company "supports a hackathon culture anymore."That gap—between Zuckerberg's stability pitch and the workforce living it—is what the memo couldn't close. He promised no more layoffs this year, then warned he couldn't promise it for long. Employees heard both halves. The question now isn't whether the next four weeks bring fresh cuts, but whether the trust to absorb them survives the last four.