Meta to Cut 8,000 Jobs and Freeze Hiring for 6,000 Open Positions - DTH

Want to get this show ad-free? Head to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash subscribe to find out how. These are the Daily Tech headlines for Friday, April 24th, 2026. I'm Rob Dunwood. Meta is planning to cut its workforce by 10%, approximately 8,000 employees, and freeze hiring for 6,000 open positions, according to a recent memo. The layoffs scheduled for May 20th are part of an efficiency drive to offset major investments in artificial intelligence talent and infrastructure as CEO Mark Zuckerberg focuses on developing advanced AI products like large language models. The cuts were confirmed by Chief People Officer Janelle Gale due to internal leaks, noting the difficulty for employees already concerned about previous job reductions. Microsoft is offering a one-time voluntary buyout program to roughly 7% of its U.S. employees at the senior director level and below, whose age and years of service total 70 or more. This biode excludes employees with sales incentive plans. Announced in a Thursday memo as the tech industry adjusts to the AI boom, the program aims to let eligible workers retire on their own terms. Following previous layoffs, Microsoft is also updating its annual reward structure to give managers more flexibility in recognizing high performance by decoupling stock from cash bonuses and simplifying the review process to five pay options DeepSeek has launched its new open AI models V4 Pro and V4 Flash a year after its original app gained popularity, faced a ban by U.S. federal agencies, and experienced a download pause in South Korea due to security concerns. The new models are highlighted for their cost-effective 1 million context length. V4 Pro is touted for advanced agent capabilities, reasoning comparable to top closed-source models, and world knowledge second only to Gemini 3.1 Pro. V4 Flash offers reasoning close to the Pro model and performs comparably on simple agent tasks. WhatsApp, in partnership with PayU, is launching prepaid phone recharges for major Indian carriers, including Geo, Airtel, and Vodafone, directly within its app. This is part of Meta's effort to boost in-app utility and transactions as WhatsApp payments significantly trails rivals like PhonePay and Google Pay. Despite having over 500 million users, WhatsApp's UPI transaction volume remains low. The new recharge feature, alongside bill pay and metro ticketing, seeks to deepen user engagement beyond messaging. X is discontinuing its communities feature by May 30th due to its low adoption under 0 of users and high rate of spam and scams 80 of reports according to the head of product Nikita Byer This feature was largely misused for user acquisition and compensated Clipper communities deviating from its intended purpose X recommends the XChap app for live group chats soon supporting up to 1,000 members as a replacement. For users who prefer the original asynchronous dedicated timeline experience, X suggests using its new custom timelines feature, which leverages Grok for topic-specific feeds. Nothing has launched Essential Voice, an AI dictation tool that rivals Super Whisper and Whisperflow. Initially available on the Nothing Phone 3 and expanding to others, Essential Voice provides system-wide dictation, converting speech into formatted text, removing filler words, and enabling custom voice shortcuts. Like Super Whisper, it integrates at the system level and supports over 100 languages for translation. Future updates will add specific AI editing and styling, signaling a shift toward more deeply integrated dictation features across the industry. Amazon and Meta platforms have struck a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar deal for Meta to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon's general purpose Graviton chips for its AI reference task. This collaboration is part of a larger trend of big tech partnerships to secure necessary processing power for AI development. Amazon in silicon unit is also supplying AI accelerator chips to other companies like OpenAI and Anthropic Simultaneously Meta is diversifying its chip supply strategy with deals with NVIDIA AMD and Google while also developing its own custom MTIA silicon to reduce reliance on external chip makers. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma confirmed the Xbox Mobile Game Store is still planned for iOS and Android, despite missing the July 2024 launch and having a non-functional URL. Sharma stated the project is not dead, emphasizing Microsoft's support for increased mobile app store competition, highlighted by its amicus brief in the Epic vs. Google case. Microsoft and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney believe legal changes compelling Google to allow third-party stores will drive innovation and permit the global launch of the Xbox Store on Android without security warnings. And finally, YouTube TV's multi-view feature, previously limited to specific channels and mainly used for sports, is finally rolling out a fully customizable option as teased in January. Subscribers are now noticing the ability to use all channels in multi-view with the updated layout including sections for recommended sports, news, movies, and shows, allowing viewers to pick any assortment of channels they wish, which significantly expands the utility of the feature beyond its original scope. For more analysis of the tech news of the day, subscribe to DeadlyTechNewsShow.com. You can find show notes and links to all the headlines there as well. thanks for listening we'll talk to you next time