MENLO PARK — Facebook app owner Meta Platforms confirmed that its previously announced worldwide job cuts of “low performers” began to take effect on Monday, in a wrenching elimination of thousands of positions.

Bay Area and worldwide workers for the owner of the Facebook social network app were facing the elimination of their jobs on Monday.

“These are performance terminations which were already announced in mid-January,” a Meta spokesperson stated in an email to this news organization on Monday.

Menlo Park-based Meta Platforms said in mid-January that it would be “exiting approximately 5% of our lowest performers.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how many Meta workers might be affected worldwide.

At the end of 2024, Meta Platforms employed slightly more than 74,000 people around the world, according to an annual report the company posted on Jan. 30 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A 5% benchmark for a workforce of that size would equate to roughly 3,700 employees worldwide.

The affected workers in the United States were slated to be notified on Monday, Feb. 10.

Meta Platforms has disclosed plans to eliminate just under 5,200 jobs in the Bay Area through multiple rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, according to WARN notices on file with the state Employment Development Department.

Those prior layoffs affected workers in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Burlingame, Sunnyvale and Fremont, the WARN letters show. The job cuts were described as permanent.

Meta Platforms has launched the job cuts at the same time it is widening its push into what it views as promising new territories in the fledgling AI sector.

The company is planning a huge investment in artificial intelligence and other markets.

“We anticipate making capital expenditures of approximately $60 billion to $65 billion in 2025 to support our core business and generative AI efforts,” Meta Platforms stated in its annual report on file with the SEC.