Meta’s job cuts are gutting customer service, leaving influencers and businesses with nobody to call
Katya Karlova
Toward the tail end of the Covid pandemic, Katya Karlova’s career morphed from fashion model to Instagram influencer. As businesses started to reopen, Karlova started posting photos of herself on the app to connect with other photographers, leading to more opportunities.
Her following on the photo-sharing service ballooned to over 250,000 people, the type of reach that attracted brand partnerships. Clothing companies like Secrets in Lace, which sells nylon stockings and lingerie, paid Karlova to promote their products in her videos.
Karlova, who lives in Los Angeles, even became a verified Instagram user, signifying at the time that she was “notable and unique,” according to Instagram’s help center.
But the party ended in a hurry.
When Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, began its cost-cutting spree in late 2022 and amped it up this year, Karlova’s Instagram account turned into collateral damage. As part of the company’s two rounds of layoffs, equaling roughly 21,000 job cuts, Meta gutted wide swaths of its customer service operation, leaving influencers and businesses with nobody to contact about their accounts.
For Karlova, that meant internet scammers were suddenly given free rein to her profile, stealing her photos and creating fake accounts that they could use to deceive Instagram users, in some cases convincing them to send money for what they described as adult-related content.
“This is really damaging,” Karlova said in an interview. “This is my brand and I work really hard to build it to be something impactful and positive.”
Even prior to the cost cuts, Karlova said Instagram failed to quickly remove fake accounts when she would report them despite the fact that new fraudsters would pop up by the week. She thought that, in becoming a verified user two months ago, she would receive a higher level of support.
However, she soon realized that her requests for help continued to go unattended, telling CNBC it’s “literally like it goes into the void.”
According to former Meta employees and documents filed to the U.S. Department of Labor, many of the layoffs affected staffers in client support, customer experience and communities.
CNBC spoke with influencers, small businesses and Meta account managers as well as a half-dozen former contractors and former Meta employees about the deterioration in customer service at the company since the job cuts began in November. Taken together, they tell the story of a company whose quick pivot in late 2022 from rapid expansion mode to forced contraction had an outsized impact on parts of the business that don’t generate revenue.
The slashing of customer service has left Meta unable to address user issues ranging from people being locked out of their accounts to software bugs not getting fixed in Facebook Groups. It’s long been a challenge for Meta, given that Facebook and Instagram are used daily by billions of people. In August, Meta’s vice president of global affairs, Brent Harris, told Bloomberg News the tech giant was looking to improve its support.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment for this story but sent CNBC examples of various ways the company has invested in customer service in recent years, including a small test of a live chat support feature on Facebook and a support site for some creators.
‘We felt it’
MeLynda Rinker has a front-row seat to the chaos. She’s a Meta certified community manager, overseeing a massive Facebook group of users who love the color pink.
Each day, some of the more than 420,000 members of 50 Shades of Pink, a group created by Rinker in 2012, log onto Facebook to share photos of pink flowers, pink Cadillacs, pink spatulas, pink hair, pink sunsets and even pink telephones.
In early February, Rinker noticed a problem with Facebook’s backend system, which she uses to manage the group and track analytics and growth metrics. A graph indicated that 50 Shades of Pink was generating zero user activity. She knew something was broken.
Rinker needed to contact someone from Facebook for help, but when she called there was nobody home.
“The day that all those people got fired, we felt it — those of us on Facebook felt it,” said Rinker. “You could tell that things weren’t getting fixed, you could tell that there were struggles because they fired all these people, so the people that remain are working with less to get the same stuff done.”
Rinker was a member of Facebook’s Power Admins Global Program, an invite-only club for influential group managers. That distinction gave her access to Groups Support where she could get help from Facebook employees who could troubleshoot technical bugs and offer product suggestions.
Facebook shut down Groups Support in January. Several group administrators, who asked not to be named, said that in the absence of the customer support feature, trying to reach an employee through the more general help center often proves futile.
According to a screenshot shared with CNBC, Facebook notified group administrators on Jan. 19 that Groups Support would no longer be available as of Jan. 23. The message with the headline, “Saying goodbye to Groups Support,” didn’t provide an explanation for the change and referred administrators to various help pages and resources in case they experienced technical problems.
“Communities are still the heart of the Facebook mission, and we continue to look at meaningful ways to invest in communities, Groups and the Facebook experience at large,” the message said.
Rinker said she was eventually able to resolve the analytics bug by personally contacting a Meta employee who she knew to escalate the issue. But that’s a Band-Aid solution and not a long-term fix. Rinker said there’s one thing the company could do if it wants to prove it cares about supporting groups after promoting them “heavily” the last few years.
“We need to put support back with those groups in order to truly show those admins that what they’re doing is important,” Rinker said.
Yet several former employees said Meta’s mass layoffs would make it even more difficult to address the rise of user complaints as CEO Mark Zuckerberg tries to right the ship following a brutal 2022.
Meta shares lost two-thirds of their value last year as year-over-year revenue dropped for three straight quarters. The struggling ad business coincided with Zuckerberg’s effort to pivot the company to the nascent metaverse, a futuristic proposition that’s costing billions of dollars every quarter.
In February, Zuckerberg declared 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency,” which includes “becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.” His comments bolstered the beaten-down stock. But they spelled deepening concern for those focused on customer experience.
An ex-employee said there were so many support complaints in 2022 that they bogged down the internal hotline called “Oops,” which people in customer service use to prioritize issues for friends, acquaintances and family members.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., demonstrates the Meta Quest Pro during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
One way Meta is trying to address the problem is through paid subscriptions. In March, the company released a verification offering in the U.S. for a monthly fee of $11.99 on the internet and $14.99 on Apple iOS devices.
The company says Meta Verified helps people, particularly influencers, get extra account protection and monitoring as well as account support.
“Get help when you need it from a real person on common account issues that matter to you,” Meta said in promotional materials for the service. Meta Verified is not yet available for businesses, but multiple firms told CNBC that they expect it to be soon.
Nobody home for business calls
Amanda Holliday, a marketing consultant, said many of her business clients contacted her the weekend Zuckerberg first announced the testing of a subscription service. While Holliday said she tries to remind her clients “to have patience and perspective and gratitude” for platforms that give marketers huge reach, she’s recognized the growing frustration.
Holliday said it appears that the only people who get customer service are those who represent a company that’s spending heavily on advertising. “It’s pretty much impossible to get a hold of anyone,” she said. “They walk you through steps you need to do for things and then you’re just sort of left like holding your phone waiting, hoping that they got your request or issue, and then you don’t hear anything usually.”
Marc Bridge, CEO of online jewelry retailer At Present, said Meta’s customer-support team routinely contacts him because he’s been steadily reducing ad spending since Apple’s 2021 privacy change that made it harder to target users.
Bridge said Meta should consider putting more investment into keeping customers happy rather than chasing them after they’re gone, calling it a “missed opportunity.”
Now that Meta has become bottom line focused, it’s trying to quickly cut areas viewed as cost centers. Some former members of the Communities team, which is tasked with building and maintaining relationships with groups on Facebook, said they’ve struggled to justify how they directly help with profitability.
Last summer, Robert Lopez, a celebrity hairstylist for the ROIL Salon in Los Angeles, experienced a nightmare situation on Instagram that began with a seemingly innocent direct message from a friend in the industry.
The message told Lopez to check out his friend’s videos on Instagram. In the clips, his friend seemed to be bragging about making a lot of money in an investment deal. After chatting back and forth with the friend, Lopez found himself the victim of a phishing scam that resulted in his account being taken over by a hacker.
Making matters worse, the hacker threatened to release compromising videos that Lopez sent to his romantic partner via Instagram DMs if he failed to pay a $5,000 fee.
Lopez was able to reach Instagram support, but the people he wrote to said they couldn’t confirm his identity, leaving him helpless as the hacker ran roughshod over his account. He was finally able to get the situation fixed by a friend at the company, but plenty of damage had been done.
“I lost a lot of followers and that does affect my work,” Lopez said, noting that companies monitor accounts when they’re considering product sponsorship deals. “The more followers you have, the more you get paid.”
But the bigger problem for him going forward is that his inside source was laid off in November, meaning next time he may not be so lucky.
Lopez’s only other option is get help through the verification subscription. However, some influencers say Facebook has had such poor customer service that there’s no reason to pay for it.
Karlova said her Instagram account is still plagued by scammers who are eating into her income, causing continued stress in her personal and professional life. With all of the turmoil taking place inside Meta and the company’s focus on cost cuts, it’s hard to have confidence that management will get this right, she said.
More recently, Karlova said Instagram flagged five of her posts that the company’s content-moderating algorithms deemed sexual in nature, leading to a dip in her following. She said it was “a big deal because they flagged partnership posts that I created for brands, which could make brands not want to work with me and impact my earning potential.”
Karlova was finally able to contest the decision but not before her account suffered days of poor statistics.
“I’m just at a loss with the amount of issues with their algorithm and the fact that there’s no one to even speak to about this,” she said.
After all the problems she’s experienced, Karlova questions whether Meta will be able to provide better customer service. It seems less likely now that even fewer people are tasked with addressing support issues.
“I don’t know that they have the bandwidth or the people to do this,” Karlova said. “I just don’t see the implementation of it. I just don’t get how it would happen.”
Watch: Morgan Stanley says buy Meta
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.
Ben Kriemann | Getty Images
Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.
Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.
There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.
Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.
Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.
In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.
Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.
CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.
WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers
Technology
IPO market gets boost from Circle’s 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.
NYSE
For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.
Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.
Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.
Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.
It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”
Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.
For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.
After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.
The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.
‘Backlog of liquidity’
In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.
“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.
Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.
Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.
Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.
“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”
There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.
And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.
The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.
Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.
While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.
Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.
FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.
Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.
But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.
“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.
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