Meta workforce falls 12% to 66,000 after summer layoffs - Anadolu Ajansı

Meta has shed 12% of its workforce in a single quarter, taking headcount to about 66,000, and chief financial officer Susan Li delivered the figure on the third-quarter earnings call with the tonal warmth of a woman reading a gas meter. The summer layoffs accounted for roughly 8,000 jobs, about 10% of staff; the quarter's decline was 12%, a gap the call did not dwell on. Both numbers arrive hedged with 'about' and 'roughly', the traditional grammar of not quite knowing how many people you employ. The remainder, presumably, is AI.

Then there is the verb. Meta 'narrowed' its full-year capital expenditure forecast to between $135 billion and $145 billion as it expands AI infrastructure. Narrowed — the range contracted, the number did not come down. It is the same move as 'role reductions' and 'rightsizing': horticultural vocabulary bolted to a commitment to silicon that will be embarrassingly obsolete before the depreciation schedule closes. Headcount goes down 12%, the capex range goes narrow, and somewhere an analyst murmurs about discipline.

Note the sentence order the company prefers. The layoffs happened 'over the summer' — past tense, weather-like, nobody's decision in particular. The capital expenditure is present tense, active, a plan with a range attached and a strategy underneath it. One is a shrug, the other is a press release. Sixty-six thousand people now live inside that strategy, quietly recalculating whether the 10% covered them, while Susan Li walks investors through the width of a ten-billion-dollar spread. Somewhere a model has two columns, people and compute, and the second column is the one with the future written in it. The 8,000 who left get a mention in the past tense of somebody else's quarter, and the analysts get a narrowed number to be impressed by.