by - A Facebook executive of more than two years said she was fired while on maternity leave.
- Anneka Patel, the ex-manager, was named one of the best PR professionals in 2020 by Insider.
- Meta laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce.
A Meta employee has said she was fired while on maternity leave.
Anneka Patel, a communications manager at Facebook, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Nov. 14 that she was one of thousands of employees affected by Meta’s mass layoffs.
Patel said she received Meta’s resignation email at 5:35 a.m. after several of her co-workers texted her saying they had been fired.
“This morning I found out I was one of 11,000 employees affected by the Meta #layoffs,” said Patel, who spent two and a half years at Meta. “This hit me hard because I’m currently on maternity leave.”
According to her LinkedIn profile, Patel managed communications for Meta’s community product groups, including Facebook groups.
Patel’s post garnered more than 11,500 replies and 560 comments in a week. Patel was included in the May 2020 Insider roundup of top professionals in the public relations industry.
Patel, former director of communications at Eventbrite, said she would be on maternity leave until February next year.
“For those who know me, working at Facebook (now Meta) has been my dream since I moved from London to the Bay Area nine years ago,” Patel said, adding that she plans to spend time with her three months old baby. baby before looking for a new job.
On November 9, Meta announced it would cut more than 11,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce.
“I misunderstood this and I take responsibility for that,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post. Zuckerberg added that he sees layoffs “as a last resort” but expects “cost-cutting changes” to continue in the coming months.
Patel was one of hundreds of former employees who took to LinkedIn to write about their experience of being laid off by Meta.
Insider previously reported that several Meta software engineers said they were fired just two or three days after moving from India to the company’s Canadian office.
According to a recent Insider report, other Meta employees wrote “badge posts” — leaving messages with a photo of their ID — after receiving the company’s dreaded layoff email.
Meta and Patel did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. When Insider contacted Patel via her Meta-email, we got an automated response telling us that the “mailbox is no longer active” and that we should “contact another person at the company.”
