Mark Zuckerberg has steered Meta Platforms into the age of artificial intelligence with characteristic intensity. The company posted its most profitable quarter ever in early 2026. Revenue hit $56.3 billion. Net income reached $26.8 billion. Yet inside its offices the mood has turned grim. Employees speak of dread. Some call reassigned roles a gulag. Others simply say everyone is unhappy.
Meta cut about 8,000 jobs in May. That amounted to roughly 10 percent of its workforce. The company also scrapped plans to fill 6,000 open positions. These moves came as capital expenditures climbed. Guidance rose as high as $145 billion for the year. Much of that money feeds data centers and AI infrastructure. Executives described the reductions as necessary to run the company more efficiently and offset those other investments. CNBC reported the details in mid-May.
But efficiency carries a human cost. One Instagram employee told interviewers, “Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives.” The quote appeared in WIRED’s May 14, 2026, examination of the company’s atmosphere. A policy staffer added that nobody seemed to be having a good time. “The vibe is a bit ‘over it,’” the person said. Lack of connection to the mission. Upcoming layoffs. American employees training the very AI models that could replace them. The sentiments repeated across more than a dozen current and former workers WIRED interviewed.
Months earlier the pressure had already built. In March Meta began reassigning thousands of engineers and product managers to a new applied AI division. Their new tasks centered on training generative models. Even skilled engineers received what many viewed as menial work. Some resisted. They faced the prospect of termination if they refused the transfer. Internal message boards lit up with protests. Training sessions turned tense. Futurism covered the early signs of friction.
The reassignments continued. By May roughly 7,000 workers had been moved. Some described the process as being drafted. The new unit earned the internal nickname “the gulag.” One engineer told reporters the experience left a person with “zero purpose in life all of a sudden.” Weekly tasks arrived with little human interaction. Business Insider reported those accounts in June.
Zuckerberg tried to address the unease. In a companywide meeting he explained that he would prefer to keep everyone. AI development costs simply tied his hands. No apology this time. Contrast that with his 2022 admission after earlier cuts: “I got this wrong.” The shift in tone only deepened the sense of finality. Employees on the anonymous forum Blind vented in growing numbers. Negative sentiment about AI at Meta jumped to 83 percent in posts. That marked a roughly 300 percent increase from 2024 levels.
Data from Blind painted a broader picture. Meta’s overall employee rating fell 25 percent from its peak in the second quarter of 2024. Culture scores dropped 39 percent. The company underperformed rivals in most categories except compensation. And even pay faced scrutiny. Median total compensation slipped to $388,200 last year from $417,400 the year before. Annual raises saw the stock component trimmed for the second straight year. Meanwhile top AI researchers could command packages worth $100 million annually. The gap widened resentment.
Then came the tracking software. Meta rolled out tools that monitored what U.S. employees typed and clicked. The goal was to gather data for training AI models. Opting out was not an option. Privacy concerns exploded. Employees referenced past data breaches in protests. Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth responded by belittling and berating some dissenters, according to multiple accounts shared with WIRED. Anger grew when Zuckerberg appeared to suggest in an internal discussion that Meta preferred its own smarter employees for monitoring rather than outside contractors.
By early June the toll had become impossible to ignore. Bosworth spoke during an internal “Tuesdays with Boz” session. Morale, he said, was “maybe not the worst it’s ever been in 20 years here, but it’s probably up there. It’s definitely up there.” He compared the current climate to the dark days of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The admission carried weight. Bosworth followed with a memo. He called for the company to “be the best place for the best people to do their best work” and to “rekindle the best of the culture.” Proposals included more transparency, support for risk-taking, budgets for travel and events, even extra money for snacks. Small gestures against large disruptions.
Zuckerberg himself later acknowledged missteps. In a memo reported by Reuters he wrote that the company had made mistakes in its AI transformation. The pace of change and the need to reimagine people strategies guaranteed errors. “We’ve made mistakes,” he stated. He added that more would almost certainly follow. The message offered little comfort to those already affected. Some middle managers, who made up about one-third of recent cuts, left teams strained. Surviving managers faced larger headcounts and greater pressure.
Efforts to boost engagement met resistance. Zuckerberg announced a company-wide AI hackathon for July. The response was brutal. Workers who had survived the May cuts and the forced reassignments had no bandwidth. “I’m literally preoccupied with keeping the lights on for my team,” one employee wrote internally. “I have no incentive to participate, let alone have the time to do so.” The memo read, to some, like a wellness seminar at a funeral. Permanent desks replaced hot-desking in another attempt to improve conditions. It changed little.
Recent coverage shows the problems persist. Fast Company noted just days ago that Bosworth’s comments reflected a situation near the lowest point in company history. WIRED followed up on the Applied AI team’s growing revolt. Engineers stuck in soul-crushing data-labeling roles continued to push back. TechCrunch described the unit as months-old yet already demoralizing. The pattern holds. Layoffs. Reassignments. Heavy AI spending. And a workforce that feels expendable.
Not everyone shares the gloom. A longtime senior leader told WIRED that for those in core AI development the moment represents “the opportunity of a lifetime.” Access to frontier models. Surrounded by expertise. The chance to build something transformative. Zuckerberg has said publicly that AI will amplify human abilities rather than replace them. In earnings calls he has noted how projects that once required months and dozens of people now finish in a week with one or two. The math favors automation in certain areas. He does not sugarcoat that some jobs will disappear.
Yet the human side remains messy. Unionization talk has surfaced. Organizers inside Meta wrote that leadership was escalating “cruel and shortsighted behaviors.” A legal staffer captured the frustration. “There’s a lot of anger and fear. It’s frustrating to watch because it feels so unnecessary.” The ad business still performs strongly. Profits keep rising. The disconnect between financial success and internal experience has rarely looked starker.
Meta’s experience is not entirely unique. Technology companies across the sector have cut more than 110,000 jobs so far in 2026. Many cite AI as both the reason for reductions and the future source of growth. But few have pursued the shift with Meta’s single-minded scale. Hundreds of billions committed. Thousands of workers redirected or removed. And a CEO who admits errors while doubling down on the bet.
Employees now wait to see what comes next. Further cuts have not been ruled out. Performance management bars are rising. AI-driven impact will shape evaluations going forward. Some are eyeing exits. Others hunker down and finish projects in hopes of being spared. The atmosphere, as one person put it, is dark. Exhausted. Still dealing with PTSD from previous rounds.
Zuckerberg built Meta by moving fast and breaking things. That approach helped create the world’s largest social platforms. Now he applies similar urgency to artificial intelligence. The company may emerge stronger for it. Its models could power new experiences across Facebook, Instagram and beyond. But the transition has exacted a price on the people asked to carry it out. Record profits have not bought peace of mind. For many at Meta, the AI future feels less like opportunity and more like uncertainty. And the uncertainty is wearing them down.
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