The company told employees in a memo on Thursday that it planned to cut 10% of its workforce - roughly 8,000 staff.

It said it would also not fill thousands more open jobs it had been hiring for.

A key reason for the layoffs is Meta's increased spending in other areas of the company, including AI, for which it will this year spend $135bn (£100bn).

This is roughly equal to the amount it has spent on AI in the previous three years combined, according to a person who viewed the memo.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's co-founder and chief executive, made public comments in January that essentially telegraphed the company would be cutting jobs again this year.

The Meta boss said he had seen how much more productive workers who relied heavily on AI tools had become, noting a single person could now complete projects that would have previously required a large team.

"I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work," Zuckerberg said.

Last week Reuters news agency reported that Meta was planning to cut potentially more than 10,000 employees this year.

The memo to employees on Thursday was first reported by Bloomberg.

While Meta has already cut around 2,000 workers in two smaller rounds of layoffs already this year, employees had been braced for weeks for a much deeper cut, as the BBC previously reported.

The company just this week informed employees that it would begin tracking and logging their interactions with work computers in order to help train and improve its AI models, a move one employee called "dystopian" given the looming layoffs.

But it had started hiring again, and last year its overall number of employees looked to be at around the same level it had been at before its initial layoff.

A number of other tech firms, most of which are also spending huge sums on building tools and infrastructure for AI technology, have also enacted swathes of job cuts this year

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