8,000 Meta workers got fired by email this morning. Singapore got the notice at 4 AM. The moment the email arrived, their laptops, work email, and accounts went dark. That is how a $1.7 trillion company tells you it is over. Inside Meta, this round has a name. They are calling it "Pralaydin," which is Hindi for "day of catastrophe." Reuters reports this is the third firing round of 2026, and the full year could end with 22,000 people gone. About one in five Meta employees. Analysts at Evercore say firing these 8,000 people will save Meta around $3 billion a year. That sounds like a lot. Zuckerberg has been writing much bigger checks for AI hires. Last summer he paid an ex-Apple engineer named Ruoming Pang $200 million to come work on AI. He paid another AI researcher, Andrew Tulloch, a reported $1.5 billion over six years. He wrote a $14.3 billion check just to get the CEO of an AI startup called Scale to join the team. The same week Meta laid off 8,000 office workers, the company is still planning to spend somewhere between $125 and $145 billion this year on AI data centers and the chips to run them. The firings save about 2% of that. Two days before the layoffs began, Meta picked 7,000 of the survivors and moved them onto brand new AI teams. The people getting hit in this round are mostly engineers and product managers. Another wave is already planned for later this year. Meta is not in trouble. Far from it. The company made $56 billion in revenue in just the first three months of 2026. That was up 33% from a year ago. Pure profit in those same three months was nearly $27 billion. The stock is off its September high but Meta is still worth $1.7 trillion. The severance is good on paper. 16 weeks of base pay, plus two extra weeks for every year you put in, plus a year and a half of health insurance. The average payout works out to about $360,000 per person. The money does arrive. But finding a new job is brutal. Engineers who got cut in earlier Meta rounds say they have sent out hundreds of job applications and heard back from almost nobody, even with Meta on the resume. So a wildly profitable company is firing 8,000 office workers via 4 AM email and instant lockout, while writing checks worth hundreds of millions of dollars to a small group of new AI hires. The Singapore workers reading their termination email at 4 AM were paying for the next $200 million hire.