Come Monday, 10th February, about 3,600 of Meta's staff will receive notice that they have been laid off.

According to internal memos that were seen by several media outlets including The Information and Business Insider, the notices will go out to both company and personal emails at 5 a.m. local time and affected employees will lose access to company systems an hour later.

One post by Meta's VP of HR Janelle Gale suggested that not even the managers of the affected employees may have the full picture, or advance warning of who will be laid off.

"Managers might not yet have all the answers to your questions, but will be partnering with their leaders and working through these changes with you to provide additional clarity," she wrote.

The initial layoff announcement in January did make it clear, at the time, that the staff to be laid off are the bottom 5% performers.

This is the third, and smallest, company-wide layoff exercise Meta has conducted in the last three years. In 2022 the company laid off 11,000 people as it made massive investments in virtual reality, and in 2023 it laid off another 10,000 among reports of over-hiring and talent hoarding.

How is Meta doing overall?

Although the current round of layoffs is performance-based, Meta as a company has been doing fine even after the quiet fizzling out of its virtual and augmented reality push and the billion-dollar losses racked up by Reality Labs.

Last year, Meta's revenue passed US$164 billion, representing over 22% year-on-year growth. While the company has not released any revenue projections for 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that Meta will invest as much as US$65 billion in AI infrastructure this year, nearly double of 2024's investments. Part of that investment includes hiring more AI engineers, with recruitment reportedly set to begin on 11 February - right after the layoffs conclude.

In addition, Zuckerberg reportedly told staff during a January all-hands meeting that he believes AI agents will start to take over operational tasks within the company. He did not confirm whether job cuts would result. 

However, the emergence of DeepSeek may throw a wrench into Meta's AI strategy. Meta is scheduled to release Llama 4, the latest version of its LLM, early this year, although the company has not yet confirmed an actual release date.

DeepSeek, having beaten Meta to the punch timing-wise, may even have already surpassed the upcoming Llama 4, according to one report by The Information. Meta engineering teams have also reportedly been in a frenzy of analysing how DeepSeek's model works and how it is able to operate on a low-cost basis.