Meta survivors after 8,000 layoffs: “morale flushed down the toilet” (大裁员中的Meta幸存员工：心气都扔马桶里冲掉了)

Shock and morale

Meta (formerly Facebook) cut roughly 10% of its workforce in a company-wide layoff in late May — about 8,000 jobs — and the survivors are reportedly still shell‑shocked. It has been reported that a LinkedIn plea from a Meta engineering manager who said he’d been demoted from manager to individual contributor has gone viral in Chinese social media, while posts on the anonymous workplace app Blind read bluntly: “Meta is dead, morale is finished. I survived, but nobody wants to work anymore — morale has been flushed down the toilet.” Multiple current and former employees interviewed by international outlets also describe weeks of colleagues doing little work before the cuts and lingering organizational chaos after them.

AI pivot and internal reassignments

The layoffs are only one visible symptom of a deeper pivot to AI inside Meta. It has been reported that the company simultaneously announced plans to move about 7,000 employees into four new “AI‑native” units with far flatter structures — managers overseeing as many as 50 direct reports, according to insiders — and asked staff to take on large volumes of low‑level data labeling and model evaluation tasks. Employees say these roles offer little promotion path or résumé value, and some feel they’ve been turned into unpaid trainers for systems that will replace them. A wave of leaflets and an internal petition opposing the monitoring of employees’ keyboard and mouse input for model training have reportedly gathered more than a thousand signatures in Meta offices.

Why it matters beyond the company

Why such bitter reaction? Because this is also about how big tech is reallocating resources: capital is flowing from payroll to GPUs and cloud compute, reshaping career incentives and job security. It has been reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff in an internal memo the company will continue to lean into AI and that there would be no further company‑wide layoffs this year, while warning that team‑level cuts could still occur. For Western readers less familiar with coverage in China, Chinese outlets such as Huxiu have amplified these employee voices; the story reflects a global tech moment in which corporate bets on compute and AI scale collide with workers’ expectations — and where geopolitical pressures, export controls and a global race for chips only raise the stakes for firms retooling around AI.