Turmoil Inside Meta Amid Its AI Restructuring Frenzy

Meta is living through one of the tensest internal stretches in its history. A rapid-fire restructuring aimed at pouring resources into artificial intelligence has dragged employee morale to what insiders describe as a record low, with discontent spreading across multiple divisions.

At the center sits the new Applied AI unit, stood up in March 2026 and stocked with roughly 6,500 engineers. Rather than energizing staff, it has drawn complaints about unclear mandates and weak job satisfaction. During one internal livestream, an employee cut in with profanities, a small but telling sign of bottled-up frustration.

Pressure intensified after the company cut about 8,000 roles, close to 10% of its workforce, in May. Instagram staff say the remaining team is now shouldering far heavier workloads, tightening an already grueling pace.

Monitoring software ignites a backlash

The breaking point came when Meta rolled out tracking software that logs keystrokes, mouse activity, and periodic screenshots. The stated aim was to gather data for training autonomous AI agents, but employees saw it as an intrusion. More than 1,600 of them signed a petition in protest.

Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth admitted that morale ranked among the worst in the company's history.

Facing the pushback, Mark Zuckerberg conceded that mistakes had been made in how the changes were carried out. He pledged there would be no further major layoffs through the end of the year and announced a series of July hackathons intended to rebuild morale and reconnect the teams.

The upheaval at Meta lays bare the cost of pivoting to AI too fast: when technological ambition outruns culture and internal trust, even one of the industry's most powerful companies can find itself in crisis from within.