Meta laid off 8,000 employees on May 20, 2026. Multiple employees disclosed that termination emails were sent in a batch at 4 AM that day, after the company had already required everyone to work from home. The layoff list included high-performing IC4-level engineers with no Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) history — people who slept less than four hours a night and regularly submitted code at 3 AM.
https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/2057089908175679663
Surviving employees found monitoring software installed on their work computers. Internal staffer Marco says the company is tracking survivors' operational patterns to train AI, with the goal of using that AI to replace more positions. This is happening during a period of record profits for Meta. Former employee Jeremy Bernier confirmed that the company still enforces stack ranking (a forced ranking system), and a large number of junior and mid-level engineers carrying mortgages, along with H-1B visa holders, ended up as casualties of the drive to boost stock prices — after endless overtime.