In brief
- Meta is cutting about 1,000 Reality Labs roles as it shifts investment toward AI and wearables.
- The cuts follow years of heavy losses in the metaverse unit and a prior 11,000-job layoff in 2022.
- The move is modest compared with broader tech layoffs in 2025, which eased late in the year.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has cut about 1,000 jobs from its virtual reality and metaverse division Reality Labs, as it reportedly prepares to shift resources toward AI wearables and mobile features.
The Menlo Park-based company announced the layoffs Tuesday morning in an internal memo from Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth first seen by Bloomberg. Earlier reporting from the paper cites estimates that Reality Labs employs about 15,000 workers, making the cuts roughly 10% of the division’s workforce.
“We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton wrote in a statement to state press outlet SFGate.
The move was a “part of that effort,” and Meta plans to “reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year,” Clayton added.
Meta’s cuts arrive as the first major tech layoff of 2026, after large workforce reductions tapered off late last year.
In November 2022, Meta cut about 11,000 employees in one of the largest layoffs in its history, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg simultaneously reaffirmed the company’s long-term commitment to the metaverse.
The move exposed early tension between Reality Labs’ mounting losses and investor pressure for efficiency, even as Meta insisted the strategy remained intact.
By the end of the same year, Meta’s metaverse push appeared to struggle due to weak user adoption, unclear consumer demand, and the growing financial drag of Reality Labs.
As capital tightened and interest rates rose, the scale of the bet became harder to justify, setting the stage for the company’s current shift away from its previously heavy metaverse investment.
Tech layoffs mount
Still, the roughly 1,000 roles being eliminated in Reality Labs represent a small fraction of the roughly 154,000 technology job losses recorded across 2025, according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
“Technology has been pivoting to both developing and implementing artificial intelligence much more quickly than any other industry. This, coupled with over-hiring over the last decade, created a wave of job loss in the industry,” the research firm wrote.
The tech sector led all private industries in layoffs last year, with job cuts rising 15% from 2024.
Industry data compiled by Layoffs.fyi show that tech layoffs fell sharply into late 2025, dropping from 18,510 in October to 8,932 in November and to around 300 in December, as large, headline-scale workforce reductions tapered off heading into year-end.
Among its FAANG peers, Meta’s move appears modest in scale.
Amazon accounted for the largest workforce reductions within the group over the past year, cutting tens of thousands of roles across retail, devices, and AWS through multiple rounds, per layoff data sourced from public reports.
Google and Microsoft implemented smaller but recurring layoffs, generally in the low thousands per round, tied to cost controls and AI-driven restructuring, while continuing to hire selectively in priority areas.
Apple largely avoided mass layoffs, relying instead on attrition and slower hiring, while Netflix made limited cuts, typically numbering in the hundreds, as it adjusted operations following changes to its password-sharing model.
Records on the California Employment Development Department do not yet show that a worker adjustment and retraining notice (WARN) attributed to Meta has been filed as of Wednesday morning, per Decrypt’s review.
Decrypt has reached out to Meta Platforms and the California Employment Development Department for comment and will update this story should they respond.
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