The day before, Meta✴ laid off employees en masse from several departments. The measure was required to redistribute resources within the company, its representative told TechCrunch.
«Today, several Meta✴ divisions are making changes to ensure resources align with their long-term strategic goals and positioning strategy. This includes moving some departments to other locations and reassigning some employees to other positions. In situations where a position is eliminated, we make efforts to find other opportunities for affected employees,” Meta✴ said.
Employees of Reality Labs, Instagram✴ and WhatsApp were fired, The Verge resource learned. In particular, Jane Manchun Wong, a software engineer who was hired at Threads in 2023, lost her job. She became famous for revealing unannounced features that later appeared in Meta✴ applications. Meta✴ technical director Andrew Bosworth and Instagram✴ head Adam Mosseri spoke about her appointment.
The layoffs were reported on their pages on social networks by now former employees of Facebook✴, HR, legal and design departments. A Meta✴ representative, however, said that the reorganization did not affect Threads, the human resources department and the legal department, and that there were no layoffs there. Some employees were offered a choice of new positions under new contracts or severance pay, said a former employee of one of the departments, some of whom chose the latter. One source said the reorganization affected more than a dozen people in his department and told them via video call. The severance pay was equivalent to six weeks’ salary.
During the pandemic era, Meta✴ (then Facebook✴) actively expanded its staff, but in subsequent years was forced to begin layoffs. In 2022, 13% or 11,000 employees were laid off, for which the head of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, personally took responsibility. In 2023, Meta✴ laid off another 10,000 people and recalled 5,000 open positions that were not yet filled.