Washington's Economy Crumbles As Meta Cuts Thousands More Jobs

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Now more than a thousand Meta employees in Washington are getting ready to lose their jobs.

[00:00:04]>> Yeah, we are seeing the numbers broken down by the state now. Uh KIRO 7's Jason Salas is live outside Meta offices in Bellevue.

[00:00:11]>> And Jason, hundreds there impacted by this.

[00:00:14]>> Yeah, around half of the local layoffs are hitting the offices right here in Bellevue. This after Meta announced last month plans to cut 10% of its total workforce, about 8,000 employees.

[00:00:25]>> These are more than 20,000 technology workers in Washington state who have lost their jobs since 2023.

[00:00:32]And as of this month, nearly 1,400 more have just joined that count from a single company.

[00:00:38]On the 20th of May, 2026, Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, began cutting roughly 8,000 employees worldwide, about 10% of everyone who works there.

[00:00:54]When the paperwork reached Washington state, it showed that 1,395 of those jobs sat right here in the Seattle area.

[00:01:04]Today, we're going to walk through exactly what happened, who took the hit, why it's landing now, and what it quietly reveals about the American economy in 2026.

[00:01:17]Let me begin with the fact that matters most because it isn't a rumor, it's a signed public document.

[00:01:24]When a large American employer plans to eliminate 50 jobs or more, federal law forces it to file what's called a WARN notice, which stands for the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

[00:01:39]The company has to give 60 days of warning, and that warning gets filed with the state.

[00:01:44]In Washington, those filings travel to the state Employment Security Department, where they become public record.

[00:01:50]We are not leaning on speculation here.

[00:01:53]We are leaning on a piece of paper with a name at the bottom of it.

[00:01:57]Around the 26th of May, 2026, Meta's filing surfaced, signed by Janelle Gale, the company's chief people officer, and it spelled out the layoffs building by building.

[00:02:10]699 jobs vanished from one address in Bellevue, 1550 121st Avenue Northeast, in a neighborhood called the Spring District.

[00:02:21]Another 215 disappeared at Meta's Dexter Avenue office in Seattle, with 44 more at a second Seattle location on Utah Avenue.

[00:02:30]206 in Redmond, and 231 remote workers based across Washington.

[00:02:36]Stack those figures together, and they total 1,395 people.

[00:02:42]GeekWire, which broke down the filing line by line, reported that this amounts to roughly 20% of Meta's entire local workforce in the Puget Sound region. A workforce that had once numbered somewhere between 7.5 thousand and 8 thousand.

[00:02:58]The job losses take effect on the 22nd of July, 2026.

[00:03:03]Hold on to that one building in Bellevue, because it carries a bigger story than any single number can.

[00:03:11]Back in 2020, Facebook, as the company still called itself then, purchased part of a headquarters building in Bellevue's Spring District for 368 million dollars.

[00:03:23]The years that followed brought steady growth on the East side of Lake Washington.

[00:03:29]October of 2022 marked the opening of an 11-story building, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Bellevue's mayor, Lynn Robinson.

[00:03:39]And at its peak, Meta's footprint in that district stretched to roughly 1.8 million square feet.

[00:03:45]An entire neighborhood was rising on the promise of these jobs.

[00:03:49]The cracks, though, appeared early.

[00:03:52]By April of 2024, Meta had already started trying to sublease space it wasn't using. And by some accounts, it occupied only about half of what it had taken on.

[00:04:03]What came next told the real story.

[00:04:06]In late October of 2025, the company handed back the development rights to five separate parcels of land in that same Spring District, which meant the expansion was finished.

[00:04:18]The developer, according to local reporting, is now weighing whether to turn some of that planned office space into apartments instead.

[00:04:28]And here's the part that stinks. The largest single share of Meta's Washington layoffs, those 699 jobs, come straight out of that very district.

[00:04:39]This isn't a line on a spreadsheet. It's a neighborhood that grew up around a company that has now, in effect, changed its mind.

[00:04:47]Which brings us to the obvious question of why.

[00:04:52]To make sense of 2026, you have to understand that this is not Meta's first round of cuts. It's the third major wave, and each one wore a different face.

[00:05:03]The first wave arrived in November of 2022, when Meta announced around 11,000 layoffs, about 13% of its staff at the time.

[00:05:14]Early in 2023, Mark Zuckerberg gave that year a name, telling the company's earnings call in February. And I'm quoting him directly.

[00:05:24]"Our management theme for 2023 is the year of efficiency, and we're focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization."

[00:05:33]A month later, in March of 2023, roughly 10,000 more positions were eliminated.

[00:05:39]Combine those two years, and Meta shed around 21,000 jobs, close to a quarter of its workforce.

[00:05:46]That first wave read clearly as a correction, since the company had hired enormously during the pandemic and was now pulling back hard.

[00:05:55]The second wave swept through 2024 and 2025, and it carried a sharper edge.

[00:06:02]January of 2025 brought a memo from Zuckerberg announcing a cut of about 5% of staff, and his reasoning left little room for doubt.

[00:06:12]His words were, "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster."

[00:06:19]By February of 2025, the company had carried that out, letting go of about 3,600 people.

[00:06:27]That phrase, "low performers," provoked real anger, and we'll return to it shortly.

[00:06:33]Now we reach the third wave, the one unfolding right now in 2026, and this one genuinely breaks from the two before it.

[00:06:43]The company isn't cutting because it's in trouble this time.

[00:06:46]It's cutting while making more money than it ever has.

[00:06:51]The numbers here are striking, so let me lay them out plainly.

[00:06:56]At the end of April 2026, Meta reported its results for the first quarter of the year, and the figures were enormous.

[00:07:05]Revenue reached $56.3 billion, up 33% from a year earlier, the fastest growth the company had posted since 2021.

[00:07:17]Profit for that single quarter landed at $26.8 billion.

[00:07:23]This is not a business on the ropes, which makes the obvious question even louder.

[00:07:28]If the money is pouring in, why send 8,000 people away?

[00:07:33]The answer, according to Meta itself, comes down to artificial intelligence.

[00:07:39]The company is pouring an extraordinary sum into the computing power behind AI.

[00:07:44]The data centers, the chips, the electricity to run them all.

[00:07:49]For 2026, Meta has told investors it expects to spend between 125 billion and 145 billion dollars on capital expenditures.

[00:08:00]>> [music] >> Which works out to more than double the roughly 72 billion it spent in 2025.

[00:08:06]Janelle Gale, the same executive who signed the Washington filing, laid out the logic in an internal memo back in April, writing that the cuts came as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making.

[00:08:23]Put plainly, the company is trimming jobs in some corners to help pay for machines in others. [music] Zuckerberg stated it openly in his own memo on the 20th of May, telling employees, "AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.

[00:08:40]The companies that lead the way will define the next generation."

[00:08:44]He acknowledged the human cost, too, adding, "It's always sad to say goodbye to people who have contributed to our mission and to building this company."

[00:08:53]And then he offered a line that reveals a great deal about the mood inside that company right now.

[00:08:59]"Success isn't a given."

[00:09:02]One more detail sharpens the whole picture.

[00:09:04]During the very same week that Meta was dismissing 8,000 people, it was shifting around 7,000 others into brand new AI-focused teams with names like Applied AI Engineering and Central Analytics.

[00:09:18]This isn't simply shrinking. It's a reshuffle, pushing bodies toward AI and pulling them away from everything else.

[00:09:25]Here in Washington, the software engineers and engineering managers absorbed some of the heaviest losses, while the AI teams stayed protected.

[00:09:35]I promised we'd circle back to that low-performers controversy, and it deserves a wider frame because the criticism of these layoffs runs deeper than any single phrase.

[00:09:46]After the 2025 round, the law firm Outten & Golden, which represents employees, objected in public to Meta tagging laid-off workers as low performers.

[00:09:58]Their statement read, "We are especially concerned about Meta's decision to publicly label these laid-off employees as low performers, a decision that goes against long-held employee privacy norms."

[00:10:10]The worry they raised was simple, that such a label could trail people and damage them as they searched for their next position.

[00:10:18]The harder criticism, though, centers on profit. Picture a company posting $26.8 billion in quarterly earnings, growing faster than it has in years, and still releasing 8,000 people.

[00:10:32]Bank of America analysts estimated the layoffs might save Meta somewhere between $7 and $8 billion a year, which is real money by any measure.

[00:10:42]Set against a capital spending plan reaching as high as $145 billion, though, it amounts to a sliver.

[00:10:50]The uncomfortable reading offered by some analysts is that the company would simply rather spend its cash on AI infrastructure than on people.

[00:10:59]In fairness, the other side deserves a hearing because the honest answer here is not a clean one.

[00:11:06]Blaming all of this on artificial intelligence is tempting.

[00:11:10]The easy line being that the robots took the jobs, but the data does not fully back that up. And serious economists are holding their tongues.

[00:11:19]Lisa Simon, chief economist at a labor data firm called Revelio Labs, studied the Washington figures and put it bluntly, "It is difficult to tell from the data if artificial intelligence is driving these layoffs."

[00:11:32]She also offered useful perspective on why it feels so suffocating in Seattle specifically, explaining there is a lot more people still employed in tech than getting laid off by many many multiples.

[00:11:44]But it is also just an example of such a concentrated city where it must feel like everybody is working in tech in Seattle.

[00:11:52]The Washington Post reached a similar conclusion in an analysis published on the 1st of May, 2026, arguing that the layoffs at Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are not all about AI.

[00:12:05]One fact backs that caution up firmly.

[00:12:08]Despite every one of these cuts, Meta's total head count in the first quarter of 2026 actually climbed 1% compared to the year before, standing at just under 78,000 people.

[00:12:21]A company truly gutting its workforce would not show that number rising.

[00:12:27]The truthful summary lands here.

[00:12:30]AI is part of the story.

[00:12:32]The post-pandemic overhiring correction is part of the story.

[00:12:36]And companies consolidating offices while reshuffling their product priorities is part of the story, too.

[00:12:42]Anyone who hands you a single cause for all of it is selling you something.

[00:12:48]This matters far beyond Meta, though, because Meta isn't alone.

[00:12:52]And Washington state is taking blows from every direction at once.

[00:12:56]Washington has effectively become the epicenter, and the geography explains why.

[00:13:02]Microsoft sits in Redmond.

[00:13:04]Amazon sits in Seattle. And Meta, Google, Oracle, T-Mobile, Expedia, and Zillow all run major operations across the region.

[00:13:16][music] When the technology industry contracts, this is one of the first places it shows, and one of the hardest hit.

[00:13:25]Look at just the past year or so.

[00:13:27]Microsoft released around 15,000 people globally in 2025.

[00:13:33]More than 3,200 of them in Washington.

[00:13:36]Including nearly 2,000 in a single Redmond filing in May of that year.

[00:13:42]Late January of 2026 brought an Amazon WARN notice in Washington for 2,198 workers. Part of a company-wide reduction of 16,000 corporate jobs.

[00:13:57]T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue, filed for 393 Washington workers. While Oracle filed for 491.

[00:14:05]Expedia for 162.

[00:14:07]And Zillow for roughly 200.

[00:14:10]Tally it all and the picture turns stark.

[00:14:14]KUOW reported that more than 20,000 technology workers in Washington have lost their jobs since 2023.

[00:14:23]And in the 12 months between May of 2025 and April of 2026 alone.

[00:14:29]Revelio Labs counted more than 11,000.

[00:14:32]That ranks Washington as the second highest state in the country for tech layoffs. Trailing only California.

[00:14:39]The damage meanwhile is bleeding out of the office towers and into the wider economy.

[00:14:46]Washington's unemployment rate climbed to 5.2% in April 2026.

[00:14:52]Up from 4.5% a year earlier in April 2025.

[00:14:58]That April reading marked the fourth straight month of increases. And it stands as the highest the state has seen since 2021.

[00:15:07]With more than 212,000 residents counted as unemployed.

[00:15:11]Annelise Vance Sherman, the state's chief labor economist, chose her words carefully when the rate first crossed 5% earlier in the year. Observing. While 5% is still relatively low, it hasn't been this high since 2021 and continues a rising trend throughout 2025.

[00:15:31]You can read the strain in the buildings, too.

[00:15:34]Downtown Seattle's office vacancy rate hit a record 34.7% at the close of 2025.

[00:15:43]One of the worst in any major office market in the country, second only to San Francisco.

[00:15:49]The street level tells the same story.

[00:15:52]According to one local economic report, around 450 restaurants, about 16% of the city's total, shut their doors in just the first half of 2025, with shrinking tech worker spending downtown named as part of the cause.

[00:16:09]When the high-paying jobs disappear, the lunch counters and the coffee shops and the dry cleaners feel it next.

[00:16:17]Let me carry this back to where we started and then leave you with the one question hanging over the whole thing.

[00:16:24]We opened on a single building in Bellevue that lost 699 jobs in a neighborhood built up on the promise of those jobs.

[00:16:32]We close on a state where more than 20,000 technology workers have been let go since 2023, where unemployment sits at its highest since 2021, and where a company earning $26 billion in a single quarter just released 8,000 people to help fund its bid on artificial intelligence.

[00:16:54]One question refuses to settle cleanly.

[00:16:57]On the 20th of May, while announcing these cuts, Mark Zuckerberg told his employees the company does not expect any more layoffs this year.

[00:17:06]Six days later, that Washington filing showing nearly 1,400 losses became public. And according to reporting by CNBC, citing people familiar with the company's plans, further rounds may still arrive in August and the fall.

[00:17:21]We don't yet know whether this is the end of the cutting or merely the latest wave.

[00:17:27]For the more than 1,100 Washington families whose jobs end on the 22nd of July, that uncertainty is [music] anything but abstract. And for everyone watching the American economy in 2026, the largest question of all may be this one.

[00:17:44]We are about to find out what happens when the most profitable companies in the country decide they can grow faster with fewer people.

[00:17:52]I'll be watching the numbers and I thank you for watching them with me.