Meta’s recent large-scale reorganization around artificial intelligence is causing violent shocks within the company. Employee morale continues to be low, and public protests occur frequently. According to reports, during an internal live broadcast meeting for thousands of employees this week,One attendee lost his temper, interrupted the speaker with foul language, and asked those present to convey his criticism to an AI executive., directly referring to the other person as "A Piece Of Shit".
This scene brought long-standing dissatisfaction within the company directly into public view. Insiders believe that the incident reflects the widespread anger and disillusionment in the newly established Applied AI department.
Faced with increasingly intensified internal conflicts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in an internal memo,The company "made mistakes" in the process of using AI to promote team reorganization, and promised to create "meaningful positions" for employees whose positions have been adjusted.
According to Reuters, Zuckerberg also said,No more company-wide layoffs expected this year. Analysts pointed out that this series of statements means that Meta’s senior management has realized that this round of restructuring is posing a substantial threat to the talent reserve and is working hard to alleviate the crisis.
Forced job reassignment and surveillance controversy: Meta AI’s transformation ignites internal anger
The Applied AI department was established in March 2026 with the original intention of providing support to researchers at the Meta Super Intelligence Laboratory. The division currently has about 6,500 engineers and product managers, many of whom were redeployed with little warning.
This unit is just the most representative microcosm of a larger restructuring of Meta. In May this year,Meta laid off about 8,000 employees on the grounds of promoting AI transformation, and about 7,000 people were transferred to new AI-related projects.. Employees from various departments such as data center engineering and Instagram reported thatWork pressure and workload increased significantly.
In addition, more than 1,600 Meta employees signed a petition asking the company to halt an internal project. This project collects training data for AI agents by recording mouse clicks, keyboard inputs and screen operations of US employees. Meta has now slightly scaled back the project under pressure.
Task downgrade and flattening dilemma, employees are trapped in career confusion
The core dissatisfaction of Applied AI department employees is not directed at the company's AI strategic direction itself, but at the fundamental change in the nature of the task and the simple and crude transition method.
The main job of engineers who have been forced to redeploy is to generate puzzles, write programming challenges, and complete evaluation tasks to test the reliability of AI models. For engineers previously accustomed to product development, feature rollout and creative collaboration, this shift is widely seen as a career downgrade.
"You suddenly have no purpose in life, hardly communicate with anyone, and just repeat these tasks every week."One current employee described his working status this way. Another employee put it more bluntly:"Most people find this kind of work breathless. "
Excessive flattening of organizational structures further exacerbated the problem. According to reports, in some teams in the Applied AI department, the ratio of managers is too low, with each manager needing to directly manage 50 employees on average.Employees generally report that they lack the necessary support, see no clear path to advancement, and have few opportunities to be seen by management.
Meta high-rise emergency firefighting: admit mistakes and start repairing them
This week, Instagram Chief Product Officer Chris Cox responded positively to the turmoil within the company during an all-hands meeting.
He described the past few months as a "difficult" and "brutal" environment brought on by the "craziness of this company."He compared the situation for employees to "running a marathon in hailstorms, having to be replaced by teammates midway through, while someone else is filming the whole thing."Cox also made a rare sober assessment of AI itself: "It (AI) is neither a god nor a devil. It is neither as good as you think, nor as bad as you think."
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was more direct in an internal memo. "Given the complexity of these adjustments, we made mistakes," he wrote. He pledged to work to provide "as much stability as possible" and announced plans to host a large-scale hackathon in July while working to adjust the management structure of Applied AI's division.
For Meta, the cost of this round of reorganization goes beyond morale. Engineering talent is the scarcest resource in the AI competition. If core employees continue to feel marginalized, the risk of attrition will intensify at critical moments. The statements of Zuckerberg and Cox indicate that management is aware of the problem and subsequent repair measures are on the agenda. But whether these efforts can stabilize people's hearts is still unknown.