Meta confirmed to TechCrunch Wednesday morning that it had begun cutting jobs from some of its teams, saying in a statement that the changes would move resources into other company areas.
“Today, a few teams at company are managing revamping their resourcing around both the long-term strategic goals where they need more resources or less and/or being aligned to our location strategy,” said a spokesperson for Meta in an emailed statement.
Some of that will entail relocating some staff, both teams to be here and also workers as well. Both of those may not be viable any longer, which is unfortunate — in situations like this when a role is eliminated that team member works to find other opportunities for impacted employees.
According to The Verge, the layoffs affected employees working on Facebook’s Reality Labs as well as others who work on Instagram and WhatsApp.
Among the employees hit by this Wednesday’s layoffs is Jane Manchun Wong, a software engineer who joined Instagram in 2023 and was hired there after becoming increasingly prominent for her discoveries of unreleased Meta app features. At the time, her hiring was hailed by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth and Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
In addition to Rosenstein, other former employees took to social media saying they had also lost their jobs. Workers across deployed reports on social media Wednesday following a wave of layoffs including design, legal operations, and recruiting employees in posts seen by TechCrunch.
There were no layoffs in those areas; a Meta spokesperson tells me that Threads as well was unaffected by the reorganization. In response to an inquiry, Company on the record declined to say how many employees were affected and what organizations they came from.
A former employee of one such group based who worked there said some employees were offered different roles under new contracts, or indicated that they could exit through a severance package. The source said that many accepted the severance package.
A now former employee tells TechCrunch the news was delivered to more than a dozen people on their team via video call yesterday. Employees cut on Wednesday received six weeks’ severance pay, the former Meta worker said. (The agent who spoke to TechCrunch did so under the condition of anonymity due to privacy concerns.)
Several employees told the Financial Times that their reasoning for being sacked was linked to purchasing non-food items (such as household needs) using up all $25 meal credits, echoing a Blind rumor.
Meta has been shedding thousands of its employees in recent years, largely to rebalance the company after adding tens of thousands of new staff during pandemic-building periods. Meta deployed around 11,000 layoffs back in the year 2022 which is equal to approximately 13% of Meta staff members for CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally accepted its blame. Meta cut another 10,000 jobs and pulled an additional 5,000 open positions off the table in 2023.
About Meta
Meta Platforms, Inc., originally known as Facebook, was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates. It began as a social networking site for Harvard students and quickly expanded globally. In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram, and in 2014, it bought WhatsApp and Oculus, reflecting its growing interest in messaging and virtual reality.
In 2021, Facebook Inc. rebranded as company to reflect its focus on building the “metaverse”—a virtual environment integrating social media, virtual/augmented reality, and digital experiences. Meta now manages platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Horizon Worlds.
