Meta quietly plans rude awakening for employees after layoffs

Meta (META) , which owns Facebook and Instagram, kicked off 2025 on a harsh note when it decided to give thousands of employees the boot.

In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s workforce would be reduced by 5%, and the job cuts would be based on performance.

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“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” said Zuckerberg in an internal memo in January.

He said the layoffs come as Meta plans to increasingly focus on developing artificial intelligence, smart glasses, 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,” said Zuckerberg.

However, the job cuts took a controversial turn when the fired employees later claimed they received high performance ratings from their managers in their latest quarterly review, sparking outrage on social media.

Before the job cuts started, a leaked internal memo from Meta revealed that its managers were given the thumbs up to lay off high-performing employees if they couldn’t meet reduction targets solely by cutting low-performing employees.

Managers at Meta face pressure to meet workforce reduction targets.

Image source: Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Meta makes a harsh move

Now, it appears that Meta is doubling down on its recent efforts to edge out low-performing employees.

The tech giant recently sent a memo to its managers instructing them to give more employees a “below expectations” performance rating in upcoming mid-year performance reviews, which will start on June 16, according to a new report from Business Insider.

Specifically, for teams with over 150 employees, Meta is allegedly telling managers to give 15% to 20% of employees (including those who recently departed the company) this low rating, which is a higher range than the 12% to 15% requirement they had to adhere to last year.

In the memo, Meta said that the upcoming round of reviews will be “an opportunity to make exit decisions,” and that “there will be no company-wide performance terminations, unlike earlier this year.”

A lower performance rating will make an employee more vulnerable to upcoming job cuts, especially if they were previously warned about their waning performance.

Companies are starting to follow in Meta’s footsteps

The move from Meta comes as many large companies (especially in tech) are making dramatic changes to their workforce to remain competitive and keep up with the pace of technology.

Earlier this year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy released his annual letter to shareholders, in which he said that he wants Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest startup.” He highlighted that because Amazon operates in “fiercely competitive market segments,” it has to focus more on moving at a faster pace.

“It’s a false binary to argue that you can move fast or deliver high standards,” said Jassy. “If you want to be fast, you can be fast, and still be high quality. We’ve done it for many years (though we can still be faster). Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it’s a priority, reinforce it constantly, organize and remove structural barriers, and build in modular ways that enable pace. But speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it.”

More Labor:

Intel is another company that is mounting pressure on its employees. Last month, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced that the company will be simplifying its operations to get ahead of its competition.

“I am taking swift actions to simplify the way we do business and drive transparency and accountability across the company,” said Tan during an earnings call last month.

He later emailed employees informing them that one of the changes involves conducting layoffs, which will happen “quickly.”

“There is no way around the fact that these critical changes will reduce the size of our workforce,” said Tan in an April 24 email to employees. “As I said when I joined, we need to make some very hard decisions to put our company on a solid footing for the future. This will begin in Q2, and we will move as quickly as possible over the next several months.”

As more tech giants double down on restructuring their businesses, about 130 tech companies have conducted layoffs this year, resulting in over 61,000 employees losing their jobs, according to recent data from Layoffs.fyi.