Meta Layoff Horror: Employee Says It Almost Feels Like 'Doomsday' On Eve Of Job Cuts; Recalls People Stuffing Bags With Free Snacks, Drinks & Chargers

The night before Meta's first major round of layoffs, employees were stuffing their bags with free snacks, drinks, and chargers. That detail shared on X by former Meta employee Adel Wu has resurfaced this week as the company prepares for what many inside are calling its biggest cut yet. Metal plans to reportedly eliminate 22,000 roles ein 2026, with the first wave of 8,000 hitting on May 20.

Wu, who lived through four to five layoff rounds during her final year at Meta, says this one feels different in magnitude if not atmosphere. "My friends still there are either just waiting hoping to get laid off, or extremely anxious because the job is their lifeline," she wrote. A current Meta employee echoed that sentiment, telling X that while the anxiety is real, the mood is not worse than the first two years, just grimmer in a more settled way. "I miss 2021 so much," they added.

How Meta plans to decide who to layoff

What makes this round especially unsettling, according to accounts published by the SF Standard and aggregated by layoff tracker LayoffAI, is what is happening to the people who have not yet been let go. Internal leaderboards now rank employees by how many AI tokens they consume and how many minutes they spend in Meta's chatbot. Workers are openly admitting to asking the bot meaningless questions simply to avoid sitting at the bottom of the rankings, because being low on the leaderboard is understood to be a risk signal.

HR told an all-hands meeting that AI usage would not factor into layoff decisions. AI note-taking is switched on by default in every video meeting. Employees are manually disabling it so they can speak candidly about who might be next, the kind of conversation that cannot happen on the record anymore.

How will affected employees find out?

The mechanics of being laid off at Meta have taken on their own grim folklore. A 7am email arrives in your personal inbox. By the time you open it, your work accounts are already dead. One Meta engineer has written a script that scrapes internal employee profiles to detect whose status has flipped to deactivated, running a personal spreadsheet on top of it to track colleagues in real time.

Meta is training AI to replace human employees

Perhaps the most striking detail to emerge is an internal post suggesting that teams who successfully build an AI system to replace their own function should be rewarded with five years of compensation before being let go. The proposal was apparently made in earnest.

Zuckerberg's message to staff at a recent all-hands, as paraphrased by those present: AI is moving fast, nobody knows what's coming, leadership is doing its best.

According to a post by tech commentator Brandon Tan, 22,000 employees are being let go or had offers cancelled, with 8,000 departures confirmed for May 20 alone. "Unless you are an AI engineer, it will be tough to get gigs elsewhere, and you are living in the most expensive city in the States," Tan wrote.

Published on: Monday, May 18, 2026, 12:39 PM IST