Key Takeaways
Silence from leadership breeds anxiety. Employees fill the void, and not with optimism Behavioral data tells you who will thrive in a restructured role, before you find out the hard way Your employer brand is what employees say about you when you’re not in the room HR needs a seat at the table before the restructuring, not just to clean up after it
Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth got on an internal call recently and said morale is probably near the worst it’s ever been in his 20 years at the company. He compared it to Cambridge Analytica. His exact words: “The vibes are off.”
What’s striking isn’t just that he said it. It’s that he also admitted leadership “did an atrocious job explaining the vision.” That’s a rare moment of executive candor, and it points directly at the real problem.
This isn’t primarily a layoff story. It’s a change management story. And HR teams across every industry should be paying attention, because the same dynamic is coming for them.
What actually happened at Meta
Between early 2025 and May 2026, Meta ran multiple rounds of cuts, around 8,000 roles gone in May alone, about 10 percent
