Staff numbers at Meta’s Irish operations are set to shrink further as the company cuts as many as 350 jobs in a new round of layoffs.
If the new cuts are implemented in full, Meta will employ just under 1,500 people in Ireland across multiple sites, including Meta’s international headquarters in Dublin, a data centre in Co Meath and Reality Labs in Cork. That is a 50 per cent reduction since its peak of around 3,000, according to an analysis by The Irish Times, a significant retrenchment by the company.
The latest round of cuts are much worse than the initial 10 per cent that was feared for Ireland.
The Instagram and Facebook owner began implementing job cuts on Wednesday as it had signalled last month. Meta is reducing staff numbers globally in a bid to offset heavy investment in artificial intelligence and to boost its efficiency, with 8,000 roles to be cut from the close to 79,000 global workforce.
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The latest round of cuts is the most significant since Meta embarked on its “year of efficiency” in 2022, restructuring the company and announcing thousands of job cuts. That translated to almost 350 job losses in Meta Ireland that year, with a further 500 announced by May 2023.
Last year, the company cut a number of jobs at its Irish operations as part of a round of “performance-related” cutbacks globally that it expected to trim around 5 per cent of its staff numbers.
Contract workers
That only covers the staff directly employed by Meta. The company also uses hundreds of temporary and contract workers through partnerships with third-party firms, including Covalen, for content moderation and other services. However, that number is also on the decline, with CPL subsidiary Covalen announcing at the end of April that it would make around 700 people redundant. That followed 300 job losses the Sandyford-based company had announced earlier in the year.
On top of job cuts, Meta is also planning to leave 6,000 open roles at the company globally unfilled, and it has also moved some staff into AI-focused roles ahead of the restructuring.
Meta has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, pivoting from its previous gamble on the metaverse that failed to take off. It has invested heavily in attracting top AI talent to work at the company as it seeks to capitalise on the push towards generative AI. Employees have been encouraged to use AI agents internally to help with writing code and other tasks.
Big Tech companies are hugely important to the Irish economy, both in terms of corporation tax and employee taxes.
The most recent accounts for Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd, a key Irish subsidiary of the tech giant, show that its payroll costs amounted to €454 million in 2024. This included €257 million in wages and salaries. Most of the staff are in administration and operations, according to the accounts, while around 370 are in sales and marketing. A further 300 are employed in engineering roles.
The Irish company paid corporation tax of €366 million that year on profits of €2.9 billion.
