'I woke up at 3am...': A former Meta employee shares heartful note after getting fired on maternity leave

New Delhi: Meta’s ex-employee Anneka Patel has shared a heartful post regarding being laid off by the company when she is on maternity leave. She was woken up early morning to nurse her baby when she saw the message of layoff. Her maternity leave is going to end in February.

She penned down a heart-wrenching note about her layoff on Linkedin. She wrote that on Wednesday morning she found that she was one of the 11,000 employees impacted by Meta layoff.

“I woke up at 3am to pump for my three month old baby girl, Emilia. I check my work email as I was anticipating the email from Mark Zuckerberg about the layoffs and there it was, but there was no details about which teams or who was impacted,” she wrote in the blog.

“Emilia woke up at 4am so I nursed her and at 4:30am I got a text from my manager that she had been laid off. I put Emilia back down to sleep at 4:45am and sat there wondering what to do next. I lay in bed, refreshing my emails, talking to other coworkers, all of us on the edge of our seats whether we would be impacted, or commiserating with those who had already been notified. One of my coworkers said the automated emails were being sent out from then until 7am so I was in two minds of whether to go back to sleep, or stay up. Then at 5:35am I got the email that I had been included in the layoffs. My heart sank.”

She said working at Meta has been her dream ever since she moved from London to the Bay Area nine years ago. She worked 2.5 years in Facebook Group product.