Meta cuts 8,000 jobs, including more than 100 in Singapore, according to former employees
Sharon Salim
The Straits Times
May 20, 2026
Meta’s latest wave of layoffs hit Singapore in the early hours of May 20, with affected employees notified via e-mails at 4am as the tech giant’s push into artificial intelligence triggered a sweeping restructuring.
Employees in the UK, US and other regions were also informed early in their respective mornings on May 20 as the company cut about 8,000 roles globally.
Meta Singapore did not respond to The Straits Times’ queries on the number of employees affected here, but ST understands from former employees that more than 100 jobs were cut.
Mr Christopher Fong, co-founder of professional community platform Key AI, organised a walk at Marina Bay on the evening of May 20 to connect former Meta staff with those affected in the latest round of retrenchments.
He said more than a dozen people showed up.
“The people I met were very dejected, and clearly, they were sort of at a loss, so they need to gather themselves and see how to handle the next steps,” he said.
While the layoff was somewhat expected this time, the waiting game had not become easier, he said.
Mr Anand Kumar Ramakrishnan, a former Meta staff member who co-organised the walk, said nearly 100 people have joined a WhatsApp group chat meant for Meta alumni as at the morning of May 20.
“Even though everybody knew for a while that the cut was coming, it still hit them hard,” he said.
“It’s an emotion overload with information overload as well.”
On LinkedIn, an affected Singaporean employee who identified himself as a business support engineer said he had been laid off after nearly a decade at Meta.
He also noted in his post that he has spent a considerable amount of time retraining himself in AI and developing systems for the team.
“AI is here to stay; apparently the human isn’t,” he said.
Other current and former employees also took to LinkedIn to show their support.
A Singapore-based LinkedIn user who was laid off in an earlier round said: “I know what these 28 days feel like. I have been through layoffs at Meta more times than I want to count,” she said.
This latest round of cuts affected mainly Meta’s engineering and product teams, and more layoffs could come later in 2026.
In a memo circulated on May 18, Meta announced that some 7,000 workers have been reassigned to newly formed teams that are focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents. The company, which has committed well in excess of US$100 billion (S$127.8 billion) to AI capital expenditures in 2026, had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March, ahead of the reassignments and layoffs.
The Singapore Industrial and Services Employees’ Union noted that while Meta is not a unionised company, it knows of Meta employees who are members of the union.
Mr Desmond Tan, the union’s executive secretary, said the labour movement has urged companies to adopt AI in a fair and transparent manner. This includes redesigning jobs thoughtfully and creating opportunities for workers to upgrade their skills.
“The objective is clear: As businesses transform, workers must advance together with them,” he said.
“When restructuring is unavoidable, NTUC’s priority is to support workers to have a just transition. This includes targeted reskilling and practical support to help affected workers move into new roles quickly.”
Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority, committing all resources to keeping pace with rivals like Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI. That has led to changes to Meta’s workforce and the way it operates.
The company has gone through waves of layoffs over recent years, as Mr Zuckerberg has pushed for increased efficiency. He has encouraged engineers to use AI agents to assist with coding and other tasks, outlined plans to track employees’ devices to improve the technology, and spent time coding his own AI-powered assistant to handle some of his CEO duties, like soliciting employee feedback.
These changes have left Meta employees both frustrated and anxious. More than a thousand have signed a petition addressed to Mr Zuckerberg and other leaders of the company demanding that it refrain from collecting their data from devices, which can be as granular as gathering keystrokes, mouse movements and screen content, in the effort to train AI.
Others have taken to social media to post about how the threat of layoffs has impacted their work and morale.
Meta’s aggressive spending on AI has caused concern among investors, who worry that the company’s investment may not ultimately pay off. While Meta has framed the layoffs as an opportunity to “offset” the cost of some of its major AI investments, analysts at Evercore estimate the cuts will generate only about US$3 billion in savings.
That is just a small portion of Meta’s projected capital expenditures in 2026, which could hit US$145 billion, and the additional hundreds of billions that the company anticipates spending on AI infrastructure before the end of the decade.
- Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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