It used to be called brothers, now it's called labor costs

Meta laid off 8,000 employees on May 20, 2026, sending out dismissal emails at 4 a.m. The company had previously required all employees to work from home. The majority of those laid off were core engineers at IC4 level with high performance and no PIP records; remaining employees were tracked using monitoring software to train AI, with AI further replacing their roles. The company was in a high-profit period, still implementing a bottom-tier elimination system internally, with mortgage pressures and many H1B visa holders in middle management being sacrificed after overtime to boost stock prices.