Not long ago, saying you worked at Meta Platforms or LinkedIn came with a lot of pride. These companies represented the peak of modern corporate success. Employees enjoyed high salaries, strong benefits and the feeling that they had secured a stable future in one of the world’s most powerful industries.
Today, Meta laid off around 8,000 employees while LinkedIn cut nearly 600 jobs. One of the voices that gained attention online after the layoffs was Gary Tay, an AdTech Business Support Engineer who spent nearly a decade at Meta.
His LinkedIn post stated, “Yesterday I was training up my new pod engineer, glad I managed to squeeze in everything,” Tay wrote, describing how he spent his final working day preparing another employee.
“Today. I’m laid off”
Tay revealed that he had spent 3,544 days at Meta, roughly nine years and nine months. He said he was “hired in London, retrenched in Singapore,” explaining how his long career at the company had come to an abrupt end far from where it began. He also said on the length of his tenure, writing that he had stayed at Meta “longer than 99.5% of current employees globally” and “99.9% longer than anyone in the APAC office.”
In the same post, Tay looked back on his years in the industry with a mix of gratitude and disbelief. “Grateful for the chance to be part Facebook early days,” he wrote. “Not many Singaporeans can say they have been a engineer at Meta & Microsoft for over 15yrs.” “This year was exceptional,” Tay wrote. “Spent a huge amount of time retraining myself with AI and developing systems for the teams.”
He said the systems he built helped “speed up workload by 2-300% while still keeping SLA with the world’s largest clients.” However, regardless of investing heavily in AI skills and productivity improvements, he still lost his role. “AI is here to stay, apparently the human isn’t,” he wrote. Toward the end of the post, Tay shifted from corporate uncertainty to personal reality. “I’ll be reassessing my career options in the next few months while I patiently wait for my newborn to come in July,” he wrote.
The 4 AM layoff emails
According to Bloomberg, Meta sent layoff emails to impacted employees at its Singapore office at around 4 am local time, or 1:30 am IST. The layoffs come as Meta aggressively increases spending on artificial intelligence. Reports suggest the company is hiring heavily for AI-focused roles, including engineers working on AI agents, recommendation systems and large language model infrastructure. In an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg, Meta’s Head of People, Janelle Gale, reportedly said the company wants “a flatter structure with smaller teams” that can move faster and operate more efficiently.