Meta employee fired in an email while on maternity leave
2 Min Read
Anneka Patel narrates her distressing experience in a LinkedIn post.
-
Anneka Patel, Meta's now former employee who was fired on maternity leave. (LinkedIn)
In a LinkedIn post, a communications manager working for Facebook - Anneka Patel - revealed that she was one of the thousands of employees that were laid off by parent company Meta. Patel had been working with the company for two-and-a-half years and is one of the top professionals in the industry.
Patel was fired in an email she received at 5:35 am after many of her coworkers also told her that they were laid off.
"This morning I found out I was one of the 11,000 employees impacted by the Meta #layoffs," Patel said. "This hit me hard as I'm currently out on maternity leave."
The LinkedIn post managed to get more than 11,500 reactions and 560 comments in just a week.
"For those who know me, working at Facebook (now Meta) has been my dream ever since I moved from London to the [San Francisco] Bay Area nine years ago," Patel said.
Nursing a three-month-old baby, Patel was supposed to be on maternity leave until February 2023.
After Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced mass layoffs, Meta on November 9 announced that it will be laying off 13% of its workforce, or over 11,000 employees.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded in a blog post, saying: "I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," and that he sees the layoffs "as a last resort," but nonetheless expects "cost-cutting changes" in the future.
Patel is only a case in the sea of LinkedIn blog posts that detail experiences on Meta's layoff.
According to Insider, a number of Meta software engineers were fired just a couple of days after relocating from India to Canada.
