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

Meta CNBC confirmed on Tuesday.

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

The company specified that it “comes out of about 5% of our lowest performers” in a separate message published by a director of the company. 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 February 10 and will receive severance pay in line with what the company previously provided. The cuts represent Meta’s biggest layoffs since it eliminated 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

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

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

Last week, Zuckerberg announced Meta is ending its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a used “Community Notes” model Elon MuskThe X platform, where individual users provide more context to posts.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards a shift in prioritizing speech, so we’re going to go back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring expression free 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 world’s most important technologies. 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 in our teams.

I decided to raise the bar in performance management and weed out the low performers more quickly. We usually manage people who don’t meet expectations over the course of a year, but now we have to make more extensive cuts based on performance during this cycle, with the intention of taking these roles back in 2025. T manage all those who did not meet expectations for the last period if we are optimistic about their future performance, and for those we let go, we will give a generous allowance in line with what we have provided with the previous cuts.

We will follow up with more guidance for managers before calibrations. People who are affected will be notified on February 10 or later for those outside the United States