Meta layoffs took workers by surprise: 'I thought I'd be clear in this layoff'

At the start of this week, a technical recruiter at Meta (META) thought layoffs wouldn't touch her, she told Yahoo Finance. She performed well at work, always meeting or exceeding expectations at a company that had prioritized attracting engineering talent for years. She was also in her third trimester of pregnancy.

"Until yesterday, I thought I’d be clear in this layoff,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I didn’t think these layoffs would be to the scale that they are, or that I would be affected."

But by 8:45 a.m. ET, she says, she was locked out of her computer, with access only to her work email.

“I tried to go look at benefits," the recruiter said. "I typed it in our search bar, and it wouldn’t let me in, saying I needed internal access.”

Yahoo Finance spoke to three Meta employees who lost their jobs this week, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns that coming forward might affect their future prospects or benefits. They all provided documentation of their employment at the company.

Two common threads emerged from all three of them. First, they all said that management had spent the last few months saying that layoffs weren't on the table. Second, they described a work environment that had shifted radically in recent days, especially after The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that layoffs were imminent.

"Meta was kind of a dream company of mine to work for," the recruiter said. "I really wanted to put my full faith in them, but seeing the scale of these layoffs and how they handled them, I don’t have a lot of faith in this company for the future.”

Meta is not the first tech company to have a mass layoff in recent days. Twitter began layoffs last week that affected 3,700 employees — about 50% of the company that's now owned by billionaire Elon Musk — and those thundered across social media. Still, the Meta layoffs represent something new for the Facebook parent, as it's the company's first-ever major job cut in its nearly 19-year history. Twitter, meanwhile, has done layoffs before, for example in 2015, under then-CEO Jack Dorsey.

'Paranoia and anxiety'

A product marketing manager, who joined the company less than a year ago, said that working at Meta was usually "confusing and convoluted," but that something had shifted in recent days. Profound nervousness had set in for him and his co-workers, he told Yahoo Finance.

"The last two days have been all paranoia and anxiety for every single person who works at the company," he said on Wednesday. "We all thought, well, some of us aren't going to be here by Thursday, so work stopped — there’s no work going on at Meta this week at all."

The layoffs hit recruiting especially hard, but the cuts came in divisions across the company — including in the company's metaverse operation, Reality Labs, all three confirmed.

Before the layoffs, staff were told not to come into the office, and the layoff emails came in waves, the employees told Yahoo Finance. The first round came in around 6 a.m. ET, and another wave came at 9 a.m. ET. One Reality Labs employee got the email at 9 a.m., just as she'd started to breathe a sigh of relief, she said.

"At Reality Labs, we were still thinking that this is top-priority, then two weeks ago there was a sudden stop," she added. "We were just going off the speculation that 'we're Reality Labs, we're going to be fine.' Even that morning, as I was talking to people, I thought I was gonna be okay."

Reality Labs has become somewhat infamous, as it has lost billions as the company pivots to the metaverse. In an internal email, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took responsibility for the layoffs, saying that he'd grossly miscalculated the operating climate.

"Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected," he told employees via email. "I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that."

The employees Yahoo Finance spoke with were divided on how satisfied they were with the benefits that they're receiving, which include paying out remaining paid time off, 16 weeks of severance pay, and career and immigration support, according to documents obtained by Yahoo Finance. The pregnant technical recruiter said Meta didn't provide enough clarity about the benefits, particularly regarding health care, while the other two said they were pleased with their packages.

Even with generous severance benefits, mass layoffs can carry legal risks and, if they're not planned out, they can spur litigation.

"When companies do things like this hastily, they can make mistakes that create problems," said Melissa Atkins, a labor and employment partner at Obermayer. "Even though something may be neutral on its face, it may be discriminatory in its impact."

Twitter has already been hit with a proposed class action, which claims the company failed to give employees enough notice of the mass layoffs under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.

Atkins is anticipating seeing more layoffs in the coming months, and it's possible that we haven't seen the last of cuts in Big Tech or at Meta.

“I think if my job had survived I’d still be really nervous right now," one of the Meta employees said.

Meta shares are up 10% on the day as of market close on Thursday, but down about 66% year-to-date.

Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks.

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