Meta may soon be in competition with Oracle for a controversial title: the tech org with the biggest 2026 workforce reduction.
The parent company of Facebook is gearing up to lay off 16,000 workers in the coming months, according to reporting by Reuters. The first half of those pink slips are reportedly going out May 20, with the rest to roll out later this year.
Rumors have been swirling for months about more pending job cuts at Meta. In March, HR Executive reported the potential for the 16,000-person cut, which will claim about 20% of the company’s nearly 80,000 employees. If the layoffs occur as expected, this will be Meta’s biggest layoff in four years and would come on the heels of multiple rounds of cuts before and since that time that trimmed the workforce already by tens of thousands.
If the predictions about Meta’s coming layoffs bear out, it would bring the organization’s total number of jobs cut in 2026 to about 18,400. According to a recent report tracking 2026 tech layoffs by TradingPlatforms, this would catapult the tech giant from fifth to second, behind only Oracle, which has recorded at least 25,000 job cuts, and ahead of Amazon and Block.
Not factoring in the potential job losses at Meta, the report found that there were already 80,117 tech industry layoffs worldwide so far this year. More than one-third have been concentrated in the Cloud and SaaS sector—predominantly because of Oracle—followed by e-commerce and marketplaces.
Across tech sectors, the push toward “efficiency-driven restructuring” is common, the report states, with AI as the most visible culprit. Yet, as many companies have also rehired offshore or lower-wage talent after a reduction, the full story is often more nuanced.
“Firms are cutting roles under the banner of AI and automation, but the real driver is efficiency: They’re reorganizing teams, reallocating talent and focusing on high-margin, high-growth areas,” says Stanislava Savisheva, analyst at TradingPlatforms.
The common narrative that AI is overtaking jobs and putting humans out of work, Savisheva says, overlooks the reality that many of these jobs aren’t simply “disappearing, ”but rather are being rebuilt, with the entire structure of how work gets done in the tech industry undergoing a transformation.
“What we’re seeing in 2026 goes beyond the typical corporate layoffs,” she says. “It’s a complete reshaping of how tech companies operate.”
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