Meta Employees Face Layoffs, Surveillance, and Shrinking Pay

As Meta prepares to lay off nearly 8,000 employees on May 20, workers inside the company say the mood has hit rock bottom. "Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives," one employee working on Instagram told Wired. According to a report by the publication, which spoke to 16 current and former Meta employees, the upcoming job cuts are only part of the problem. Mandatory tracking software installed on work laptops, shrinking pay, forced job transfers, and courtroom losses have combined to create what workers describe as a uniquely miserable moment in the company's history.

'Just do it now'

Meta plans to cut roughly 10 percent of its workforce — nearly 8,000 people — in what the company describes as a move to run more efficiently and fund other investments, including AI. But for many employees, the worst part is not the layoffs themselves. It is the waiting. News of the cuts leaked back in March, but Meta did not officially confirm them for weeks. CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally addressed employees in a companywide meeting last month, saying AI development costs so much that his hands were tied. Workers would find out in May whether they still had jobs. That gap between announcement and action has left many in a spiral. Several employees told Wired that anyone who can afford to leave is actually hoping to be laid off — just to receive the 16 weeks minimum of severance and 18 months of paid healthcare that come with it. As one Instagram employee put it: "Everyone is just like, do it now, jesus fucking christ."

Spy software that no Meta employee agreed to

Around the same time the layoffs were confirmed, Meta installed mandatory tracking software on corporate laptops belonging to US employees. The tool, known internally as Model Capability Initiative or MCI, records what employees are typing and clicking — with the stated purpose of training AI models to carry out tasks the way a human would. Opting out is not an option, according to three employees. "Nobody is happy about it," one current employee said. "And we have no choice." When workers raised concerns in internal messages — including pointing to Meta's own history of user data breaches — the company's chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth reportedly "belittled and berated" those who spoke up, according to one veteran employee whose account was confirmed by another. "These billionaires can't even feign empathy," the first person said. "The social contract is completely shattered at this point. " The tracking tool has not been rolled out outside the United States, which several employees attributed to stricter privacy laws and worker protections in other countries.

Pay is falling while profits are rising, claims Meta staff

Adding to the frustration is the fact that employee pay has been quietly shrinking even as Meta posts record profits. In February, Meta cut the portion of annual raises paid in company shares for the second year in a row — trimming them by five percent on top of a ten percent cut the previous year. Median total compensation at Meta fell to $388,200 last year from $417,400 in 2024. Meanwhile, Meta reported nearly $27 billion in profit in just the first three months of this year. And Zuckerberg has reportedly offered some top AI researchers as much as $100 million a year — figures a former executive described as "insane amounts of money relative to what anybody in that company has ever been making." "For many employees, salary is half stock, so that sucks," the Instagram employee said.

Forced transfers adds to Meta employees’ frustration

Early last month, Meta forcibly moved at least 1,000 top engineers into a new Applied AI Engineering division. Those who refused the transfer were told they could face layoffs — an unusual threat in Silicon Valley, where technical staff normally have the freedom to move to other teams during a restructuring. Some employees called it a "draft." For one technical worker, the episode made clear that Meta was no longer "seeing us as partners."

The 'AI divide' at Meta

Not everyone at Meta is reportedly miserable. Employees working on frontier AI research, particularly those inside the TBD Lab unit, have been largely shielded from the chaos. And some workers say there is genuine excitement about what AI could mean for the company's future. "This is the opportunity of a lifetime," one longtime senior Meta leader told Wired. "You have permission to go learn all of this and access frontier models, and you're surrounded by people who have this expertise." But for most workers, that vision feels distant. The only official advice from HR ahead of next Wednesday's cuts, according to employees, was to make sure personal email addresses were updated in the system — and then wait. "It's a lot to cram into a short period of time," one employee said. "Everyone ends up miserable."

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