Meta Planned to Cut Teams 60 Percent Until Staff Revolted

Meta explored cutting many of its teams by up to 60 percent under an AI native plan named Project OT, then Mark Zuckerberg called off the second layoff wave.

The plan, hatched at Zuckerberg's Hawaii retreat in January, imagined AI absorbing the daily work of thousands of employees while small talent dense pods of humans supervised the virtual workers.

Meta confirmed the project and the two wave design, saying the most drastic scenarios cut some teams by up to 60 percent, and that it never intended to cut 60 percent of the whole company.

Staff turned on the plan after Meta mandated tracking software that captured keystrokes and mouse clicks to teach AI agents to imitate them, and internal sentiment fell from 74 percent favorable to 55 percent.

The technology underdelivered at the same time: code changes rose 220 percent year over year while changes that actually reached users rose 36 percent, and major technical and security incidents jumped 40 percent.

Hours before the May 20 layoff Zuckerberg canceled the November wave, cut 10 percent of staff anyway, and sent executives to rebuild morale with better microkitchen snacks and bigger travel budgets.

Zuckerberg now concedes agent technology did not accelerate as he expected and markets Meta as betting on people, while employees parse his promise of no company wide layoffs this year for what it leaves open.

The reversal costs Meta less than it looks. NPR counted 8,000 people cut and another 7,000 reassigned to AI teams, and CNBC reported 6,000 open roles scrapped while capital expenditure guidance climbed toward $145 billion. Staff absorb that squeeze. Zuckerberg promised no company wide layoffs this year, wording narrow enough to leave team level and performance cuts untouched, and the sector is running the same arithmetic at roughly 110,000 tech layoffs across 137 companies so far in 2026. Watch whether the canceled November wave returns under a new name in 2027 planning.