Zuckerberg fires employees with six-figure salaries for misusing the office's food delivery system

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has fired a number of employees after they abused the company's $25 meal program to order household goods like toothpaste and washing powder.

Nearly 30 employees at the company's Los Angeles office were fired after they were found to be routinely using takeout credit to order food and cosmetics, employees said.

The layoffs included highly paid engineers with six-figure salaries, according to posts on the anonymous chat app Blind.

Meta, currently valued at $1.5 trillion, offers free breakfast, lunch and dinner to employees in its larger offices.

Those who work in smaller offices without a staff canteen instead receive vouchers for delivery apps such as Grubhub, which they can use to order food while working in the office.

However, Meta recently discovered that some employees used the $25 coupons to order household items from stores featured on the apps.

According to the Financial Times, in some cases employees used the program to purchase wine glasses and laundry detergent.

Meta and other Silicon Valley companies have long offered free food in their offices, seen as an incentive to come to the office instead of working from home or, in the case of breakfast and dinner, to encourage longer work hours .

Staff initially received warnings about abusing the meal voucher system, but those who continued to do so were fired last week.

The news came as Meta also laid off a larger number of employees at WhatsApp, Instagram and its virtual reality unit on Wednesday.

The company said it would restructure certain departments and relocate some employees to other areas.

The layoffs are not believed to be as widespread as the mass layoffs in 2022 and 2023, when Meta cut tens of thousands of employees, which Zuckerberg described as driving “efficiency.”

A Meta spokesperson said: “Today, some teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and site strategy.

“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 has cut perks introduced in recent years to encourage employees to come to the office and eliminated “to-go” boxes that allowed employees to take food home, as well as perks like laundry service.

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