Silicon Valley giant slashes more jobs in AI boom bloodbath

The AI bloodbath continues in tech as Meta cuts thousands of jobs in Silicon Valley. 

The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, laid off 2,212 people at its Menlo Park headquarters and an additional 213 workers were cut at the Sunnyvale office, Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN filings that were released on Thursday show. 

WARN filings, which stands for the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers to provide notification of mass layoffs. 

Meta announced in April that it was planning to reduce its workforce by 10% in May, as artificial intelligence continues to disrupt the industry. 

In a memo sent to staff on May 20, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is “transforming” and that “success isn’t a given.” 

“AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes,” Zuckerberg said in the memo first reported by The New York Times. “The companies that lead the way will define the next generation.” 

The filings revealed some of the most significant job loss the region has seen in recent years, and comes on top of earlier notices that showed layoffs of more than 300 workers in Burlingame, 252 in San Francisco, and 81 in Fremont, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. 

Workers that were most impacted by the layoffs were software engineers, specifically cuts to teams that focused on business-facing AI products that were integrated across the company’s social media platforms, according to SFGATE. 

Employees will get 16 weeks of base pay, and an additional two weeks for every year of employment, the outlet reported. 

“The changes we are implementing vary by team and include layoffs, open role closures, and moving thousands of employees to business critical priorities across the company,”  Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told the paper in an email.

The Bay Area has been hit especially hard by layoffs as the tech industry undergoes a massive realignment due to AI. 

Earlier this week the website building and hosting platform Webflow revealed many of its staff will lose their jobs. 

“The way businesses build for the web is changing fast,” Webflow CEO CEO Linda Tong said. “AI is rewriting the rules for how marketing teams create, test, and optimize digital experiences. And the companies that move decisively through moments like this are the ones that come out ahead.”

More than 140,000 tech jobs have been slashed so far this year, with AI largely being at the center of restructuring. 

Other major tech leaders like Intuit, Cisco, and LinkedIn are also making drastic changes to their workforce. 

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