Meta Is Laying Off Employees At WhatsApp, Instagram And More



Meta has begun laying off employees across various departments, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs, according to people familiar with the matter. Rather than a mass, companywide layoff, these smaller cuts seem to coincide with reorganizations of specific teams, The Verge reported.

Some Meta employees have started posting that they’ve been laid off. Among them is Jan Manchun Wong, who gained notoriety for reporting on unannounced features coming to apps before joining the Threads team in 2023.

“Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy, company spokesperson Dave Arnold said in a statement shared with The Verge. “This includes moving some teams to different locations and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees.”

The Guardian reported Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their $25 (£19) meal credits to buy items such as toothpaste, laundry detergent, and wine glasses.

The tech firm, which is worth £1.2tn and also owns the messaging platform WhatsApp, is said to have dismissed workers last week after an investigation discovered staff had been abusing the system, including sending food home when they were not in the office.

That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.

The worker admitted the breach when approached as part of a human resources investigation into the practice and was later fired. “It was almost surreal that this was happening,” the person wrote, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the story.

Some employees were also found to have spent the credits on other household items, such as acne pads. Employees who had only occasionally broken the rules were reprimanded, but were able to keep their jobs, the newspaper reported.

Free food has long been one of the perks for working for large tech companies.

CNN reported Meta fired around two dozen employees from its Los Angeles office for misusing company meal credits for things like laundry detergent, wine glasses, and acne treatment pads, a source familiar with the company confirmed to CNN.

Many of the social media giant’s corporate offices feature elaborate food services to provide employees with meals as a perk. Meta’s two-year-old office near New York City’s Penn Station, for example, features a cafeteria that feels like an upscale food court, with various stalls all free for staff.

But for employees at smaller offices without food services, the company provides meal vouchers — $20 for breakfast and $25 each for lunch and dinner — so they can have food delivered to the office while on the job.

The meal vouchers are meant for employees to eat while working at the office — sometimes long hours stretching across several meals of the day, notorious in the tech world.

In my opinion, it’s great that a company as large as Meta is offering food vouchers for its workers. Clearly, Meta is not thrilled about workers using the vouchers to buy household items, and is laying people off for doing so.