Meta fires employees for spending food allowances on personal items like acne pads and wine glasses

new York
CNN
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Meta fired about two dozen employees from its Los Angeles office for misusing company meal credits for things like laundry detergent, wine glasses and acne treatment pads, a source familiar with the company confirmed to CNN.

Many of the social media giant's corporate offices have sophisticated food services to offer meals as perks to employees. Meta's two-year-old office near New York's Penn Station, for example, has a cafeteria that feels like an upscale food court, with various booths, all free to employees.

But for employees in smaller offices without food service, the company provides meal vouchers — $20 for breakfast and $25 each for lunch and dinner — so they can have food delivered to the office while they work.

The meal vouchers are designed to allow employees to eat while working in the office – sometimes long hours that span multiple meals a day, which is notorious in the tech world.

An internal investigation found that some L.A.-based employees instead used or had used meal funds to purchase items other than food Meals were delivered to homes, the source said.

Meta's average total annual compensation for individual employees (excluding CEO Mark Zuckerberg) is $379,050, the company said in a regulatory filing earlier this year.

The layoffs, which took place last week, were first reported by the Financial Times.

The news of the layoffs comes as meta admitted on Thursday that it had laid off employees across the company as part of a series of separate restructurings.

“Today, some teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and site strategy,” Meta spokeswoman Tracy Clayton said in a statement. “This includes moving some teams to other locations and moving some employees to other roles. In situations like this where a position is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for the affected employees.”

Meta declined to say how many employees were laid off.

The cuts occurred across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Reality Labs, which houses Meta's virtual reality and Metaverse efforts.

Among those fired was Jane Manchun Wong, a prominent security researcher who became known in the tech world for predicting new social media features — like a Facebook resume feature and a tool on the platform formerly known as Twitter and it Allowed users to hide replies to their tweets – before being hired by Meta in June 2023 to work on the Instagram and Threads team.

Meta laid off more than 20,000 employees in multiple rounds of cuts last year to reverse a year of declining revenue and stagnant user growth that Zuckerberg called a “year of efficiency.” Shares of the company (META) are up nearly 80% since this time last year