Meta will begin terminating employees in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond and remote positions starting July 22, the company said after filing a WARN notice with the Washington State Employment Security Department on Friday.
The moves will affect nearly 1,400 workers across Washington state — including 699 cuts in Bellevue, 259 employees across two Seattle offices, 206 workers in Redmond and 231 remote employees statewide — and target software engineers, data scientists, content designers and IT staff.
The scale of the action follows Meta’s announcement last week that it would eliminate roughly 10% of its global workforce while shifting thousands of workers into AI-focused roles. At the end of March Meta employed nearly 78,000 workers worldwide.
A Meta spokesperson said: "The changes we are implementing vary by team and include layoffs, open role closures and moving thousands of employees to business critical priorities across the company." The company’s filing begins the formal process that will let affected employees know of terminations starting July 22.
For local workplaces the numbers are stark. Bellevue, home to Meta’s largest Washington presence, will absorb the biggest share — 699 workers — while two Seattle offices together will lose 259 employees and Redmond will lose 206. The filing also identifies 231 remote employees in Washington who will be affected.
The layoffs encompass a cross-section of technical and product roles: software engineers who build services, data scientists who train models, content designers and IT staff who keep systems running. That mix underlines that these are not limited to a single function but cut across teams the company says it still needs to retool.
Context for the decision arrives after Meta outlined a strategic pivot: the company is spending billions on data centers, advanced chips and internal AI tools and is repositioning its workforce to compete in artificial intelligence with rivals. The cuts in Washington are part of that broader overhaul tied to Meta’s AI initiatives.
The sequence creates friction between two corporate aims. On one hand, Meta says it will move thousands of employees into AI-focused roles; on the other, it is simultaneously ending positions — nearly 1,400 in Washington alone. The spokesperson’s statement that changes will "vary by team" frames the company’s approach as a mix of layoffs, open role closures and internal redeployments, but it does not specify which affected workers will be offered new, AI-related roles.
That gap is the most consequential tension in the filing. Meta’s public accounting of workforce size — nearly 78,000 at the end of March — and its pledge to cut roughly 10% globally set the scale, but they do not resolve who among the affected Washington staff will be absorbed into the new AI priorities and who will be let go with no internal alternative.
The unanswered question now is clear: will the thousands of roles Meta says it needs for its AI push include the nearly 1,400 Washington employees scheduled for termination, or will those cuts represent permanent losses in a region that hosts substantial parts of the company’s engineering and product operations? How Meta answers that will determine whether these local job losses are a temporary reallocation or a lasting reduction of its Washington workforce.
