Meta announces 5% cuts targeting low performers. Read the memo

Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing staffers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed employees about the decision to “move out low performers faster” in a memo posted on the company’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday. Zuckerberg told employees 2025 will “be an intense year.”

The company specified that it is “exiting approximately 5% of our lowest performers” in a separate message posted by a company director. Meta has more than 72,000 employees, according to its most recent quarterly report.

Meta said employees affected by the layoffs will be notified by Feb. 10 and receive severance in line with what the company has provided previously. The cuts represent Meta’s largest layoffs since it eliminated 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

Bloomberg was first to report the cuts, citing an internal memo.

The move follows several major operational changes within Meta aimed at building closer ties with President-elect Donald Trump.

Last week, Zuckerberg announced Meta would end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a “Community Notes” model used on Elon Musk’s platform X, where individual users provide more context to posts.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcement.

Below is Zuckeberg’s internal memo, which CNBC obtained.

Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media. This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams.

I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025. We won’t manage out everyone who didn’t meet expectations for the last period if we’re optimistic about their future performance, and for those we do let go, we’ll provide generous severance in line with what we provided with previous cuts. 

We’ll follow up with more guidance for managers ahead of calibrations. People who are impacted will be notified on February 10 or later for those outside the U.S.