by - A Facebook executive aged over two said she was fired while on maternity leave.
- Anneka Patel, the ex-manager, was named one of Insider’s top PR professionals of 2020.
- Meta laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce.
A Meta employee said she was laid off while on maternity leave.
Anneka Patel, 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 dismissal email at 5.35am after several of her colleagues texted her saying they were being fired.
“This morning I found out I was one of the 11,000 employees affected by the #layoffs at Meta,” said Patel, who worked at Meta for two and a half years. “It hit me hard as I’m currently on maternity leave.”
According to her LinkedIn profile, Patel managed communications for Meta’s community product groups, which included Facebook groups.
Patel’s post received over 11,500 replies and 560 comments in one week. Patel was included in Insider’s roundup of the top PR industry experts in May 2020.
Patel, a former communications director at Eventbrite, said she is on maternity leave until February next year.
“For those who know me, working at Facebook (now Meta) has been my dream since I moved to the Bay Area from London nine years ago,” Patel said, adding that she plans to spend time with her three months old child to spend baby before looking for a new job.
On Nov. 9, Meta announced it would lay off more than 11,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce.
“I got that wrong, 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 used LinkedIn to write about their experience of being fired by Meta.
Insider previously reported that several of Meta’s software engineers said they were laid off just two or three days after moving from India to the company’s Canada office.
Other Meta employees wrote “badge posts” — farewell messages with a photo of their IDs — after receiving the company’s dreaded layoff email, according to a recent Insider report.
Meta and Patel did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. When Insider contacted Patel via her meta-email, we received an automated response that said, “The mailbox is no longer active” and “Contacted someone else at the company.”
