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Meta employee who survived 4 am layoffs says hardworking teammate was suddenly fired: 'She gave it her all'
Meta said that the layoffs are part of a restructuring effort aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs while continuing heavy investments in AI.
Thousands of employees at Meta woke up to uncertainty on Wednesday as the social media giant began notifying staff about another major round of layoffs affecting nearly 8,000 workers globally. The company, which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, said that the layoffs are part of a restructuring effort aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs while continuing heavy investments in artificial intelligence (AI).
According to a report by Bloomberg, employees in Singapore were among the first to receive notices, with some reportedly informed at around 4 am local time. Staff in Europe and the United States were also expected to receive updates early in their respective time zones. The layoffs are expected to impact engineering and product teams the hardest, with the possibility of more job cuts later this year.
(Also Read: Meta lays off 8,000 employees worldwide due to AI-driven restructuring)
Amid the layoffs, a post on anonymous workplace forum Blind has gone viral after a Meta employee who survived the cuts expressed guilt over remaining employed while a teammate lost her job.
In the post titled “I feel bad for surviving,” the employee wrote that people laid off from Meta should not automatically be viewed as poor performers. “Please don’t think people laid off from Meta are bad performers, I’m an average performing scrub and I feel so bad for surviving when my teammate got laid off,” the employee wrote.
Describing the colleague as “super humble and reliable,” the employee said she had worked relentlessly on a project with a tight deadline, often sleeping less than 4 hours for months. “I think she fell sick many times due to overwork and now she suddenly got cut,” he wrote.
The employee added that the teammate had a strong track record, handled important projects and had no performance warnings, making the decision even harder to understand. “I seriously don’t know why they chose her out of all people… I remember past few months I saw her publishing commits at 3am, then at 6am. Like when did you even sleep,” the post read.
“Please be kind to everyone and don’t generalise the people who got cut,” he concluded.
Social media reactions
The post quickly resonated with others online, many of whom said the layoffs appeared arbitrary.
“These cuts are random. We lost some best people too. Don’t be too hard on yourself,” one user commented.
“Survivor's guilt is real and what you are feeling says a lot about the kind of person you are. The hardest truth about these layoffs is that they are rarely about individual performance and more about org structure, team priorities and budget decisions made by people who never even looked at her commit history. The fact that she gave everything she had and still got cut is genuinely heartbreaking and it is okay to feel angry about that. Be there for her right now, a simple message checking in means more than most people realize when someone is processing a sudden layoff. And you are right, the people who got cut at Meta are not bad performers, they are just people who got caught in a business decision that had nothing to do with their worth,” commented another.
“Good news is she learned a lesson not to give a company a second of your health and free time,” said one user.
(Disclaimer: This report is based on user-generated content from social media. HT.com has not independently verified the claims and does not endorse them.)
