MENLO PARK, Calif. - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reassured surviving employees Wednesday that he does not expect additional company-wide layoffs this year, immediately calming workers who had previously feared layoffs he did expect.
The memo arrived the same day Meta was cutting roughly 10% of its global workforce and moving 7,000 other employees into AI-related initiatives, giving the reassurance what communications experts described as "excellent contrast."
Workers reportedly focused on two phrases in the announcement: "company-wide" and "expect," both of which legal teams confirmed are technically words.
"This gives us tremendous visibility," said a Meta engineer. "I now know with confidence that any future layoffs may be divisional, regional, role-specific, performance-based, AI-enabled, unexpected or all of the above, but probably not company-wide in the exact sense used at 9:14 this morning."
Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta could improve its communication, a goal the company plans to pursue by training an AI agent capable of generating empathetic restructuring memos before management realizes a restructuring is necessary.
Executives said the company is reorganizing around AI agents to make internal work more efficient. Employees were encouraged to see the transition as an opportunity to collaborate closely with the software being evaluated to determine whether their jobs remain necessary.
By afternoon, morale had improved from "terrified" to "carefully parsing adverbs."
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