‘Dead and depressing’: Meta staff vent about AI and layoffs on Blind
After Meta announced it would lay off 10% of its workforce next month to offset AI spending, employees swarmed to Blind—an anonymous online workplace forum—to get a few things off their chests.
According to a report by Blind provided to Fast Company, posts containing negative sentiment about AI at Meta have grown to 83% since late 2025—that’s a roughly 300% jump since 2024, when just 20% of posts on the site about AI at Meta were negative.
“Meta is dead and depressing,” one post on the platform said after the company’s layoff announcements.
Cynicism around AI and workplace culture at Meta is pervasive on the platform. “They do not care about the employees anymore and all they care about is AI,” another post said.
In April alone, there have been 523 posts related to Meta’s layoff announcement. While there was an uptick in posts after the layoff announcement, Blind’s data is telling that perspectives around AI at Meta have been pervaded with anxiety and negativity for some time now. (The platform—which is especially popular among tech professionals—has different tiers of verification and keeps employee emails encrypted.)
In 2019, most of the posts on Blind about AI at Meta on the platform were described as optimistic. Through the years, though, such posts took a turn towards anxiety.
From 2024 to 2025, the negativity deepened, with discussions about layoffs being a dominant theme in the conversations. Blind CEO Sunguk Moon said that employees have rated the culture at Meta a 2.23 out of five, a 43% drop since 2020.
“We’ve seen sentiment among Meta employees turn more negative in the past two years, largely due to layoffs and the internal push for AI adoption,” Moon told Fast Company. “The top, recurring sentiment among Meta employees is that, while the benefits and pay remain competitive, the mental health of employees worried about job stability continues to worsen.”
Meta declined Fast Company‘s request for comment.
Meta has made its commitment to AI adoption and innovation clear. The company announced earlier this year that it would spend $135 billion on AI initiatives. Some of its endeavors, like tracking the staff’s mouse movements and keystrokes to train AI models, ruffled employees’ feathers.
“I feel violated,” one anonymous user posted to Blind in response to the tracker news. “I get it that Meta is trying to improve the quality of AI and all that but seriously? Are you gonna monitor our every move and see how our mouse moves? Screenshot our screen sometimes? What next? Implement chips in our brains to read our minds?”
On May 20, 8,000 employees out of the company’s workforce of more than 78,000 will be laid off, with an additional 6,000 open roles set to be closed. In an internal memo sent to employees, Meta attributed the cuts to the company’s “continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.”
While the memo didn’t name AI as the direct cause of the layoffs, the tech is a hot topic at Meta. At least on Blind, it’s clear that employees are receiving a message of replacement rather than innovation.