Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta laid off nearly 13% of its 87,000 employees this week
Indians staying overseas and working at Meta were promised visa assistance post the layoffs, but have now complained of radio silence from the team
While the number of employees impacted in India is undisclosed, a total of five Meta offices in the country housed around 300-400 employees
In what was the biggest layoff exercise undertaken by a tech company across the globe, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta laid off 13% of its workforce, or 11,000 employees earlier this week, with no country-specific number out yet. Several Indians who were laid off by Meta have taken to social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn to share their layoff stories and woes.
Several of these Indians had recently moved overseas to join the US or Canada offices of the social media giant, but claim that they were laid off only days after they joined the offices.
“Yesterday morning I found out that I am one of the 11,000 employees impacted by the Meta layoff,” one of the former Meta techies from India wrote on LinkedIn. “I joined Meta three days back, after waiting for a long visa process and working for Amazon for three years”.
The story seems to be the same for several other employees as per their LinkedIn posts and tweets. “I relocated to Canada to join Meta and two days after joining, my journey came to an end,” another developer stated.
Several other heartbreaking stories have emerged from the Meta layoffs. A member of Meta’s communications team was laid off during her maternity leave, a former Facebook intern joined the company as production engineer but was let go, a senior technical program manager who was with the company for nearly a year was laid off, impacting his eligibility for the H1-B visa.
“It feels surreal to say this but unfortunately, I was affected by the mass layoffs that happened at Meta. This came as a shock to me since I’d just joined their social AR team a few months ago,” one of Meta’s former product designers wrote.
According to various media reports, a total of five Meta offices in India housed around 300-400 employees, with WhatsApp accounting for the smallest team of 60 members.
Indians staying overseas were promised visa assistance after the layoffs, but several employees have stated that Meta’s communications team went on radio silence soon after Zuckerberg made the layoff letter public. The number of Indian employees fired globally or from the India offices is not clear yet.
Meta has stated that all the employees who have been fired will get 16 weeks of base pay, plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.
It will also provide three months of career support with external vendors, including early access to unpublished job leads for all those who have been laid off.
The global economic slowdown has hit tech companies hard, and many like Twitter, Lyft, Spotify and many more have resorted to layoffs in the recent past to cut expenses.
In India, the funding squeeze due to the slowdown has hit startups the hardest, forcing many of them to layoff employees. As per Inc42’s layoff tracker, Indian startups have fired nearly 16,000 employees in 2022 so far.
