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
Technology
Meet the 21-year-old helping coders use AI to cheat in Google and other tech job interviews
A person walks past the entrance to a Google building in Dublin, Feb. 15, 2023.
Artur Widak | Anadolu | Getty Images
After landing internship offers from Amazon, Meta and TikTok, computer science student Chungin “Roy” Lee has decided to move to San Francisco.
But he won’t be joining any of those companies.
Instead, Lee will be building his own startup that offers a peculiar service: helping software engineers use artificial intelligence to cheat in their technical job interviews.
“Everyone programs nowadays with the help of AI,” said Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, which has opened disciplinary proceedings against him, according to documents viewed by CNBC. A Columbia spokesperson said the university doesn’t comment on individual students.
“It doesn’t make sense to have an interview format that assumes you don’t have the use of AI,” Lee said.
Lee is at the forefront of a movement among professional coders who are exploiting the limitations of remote job interviews, popularized during the Covid pandemic, by using AI tools off camera to ensure they give hiring managers the best possible answers.
The hiring process that took hold in the work-from-home era involved candidates interviewing from behind a Zoom screen rather than traveling, sometimes across the country, for on-location interviews, where they could show their coding skills on dry-erase boards.
In late 2022 came the boom in generative AI, with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Since then, tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of programmers while touting the use of AI to write code. At Google, for example, more than 25% of new code is written by AI, CEO Sundar Pichai told investors in October.
The combination of rapid advancements in AI, mass layoffs of software developers, and a continuing world of remote and hybrid work has created a novel conundrum for recruiters.
The problem has become so prevalent that Pichai suggested during a Google town hall in February that his hiring managers consider returning to in-person job interviews.
Google isn’t the only tech company weighing that idea.
But engineers aren’t slowing down.
Lee has turned his cheating into a business. His company, Interview Coder, markets itself as a service that helps software developers cheat during job interviews. The internship offers that he landed are the proof he uses to show that his technology works.
AI assistants for virtual interviews can provide written code, make code improvements, and generate detailed explanations of results that candidates can read. The AI tools all work quickly, which is helpful for timed interviews.
Hiring managers are venting their frustrations on social media over the rise of AI cheaters, saying that those who get caught are eliminated from contention. Interviewers say they’re exhausted from having to discern whether candidates are using their own skills or relying on AI.
‘Invisible’ help
The cheating tools rely on generative AI models to provide software engineers with real-time answers to coding problems as they’re presented during interviews. The AI analyzes both written and oral questions and instantaneously generates code. The widgets can also provide the cheaters with explanations for the solutions that they can use in the interview.
The tools’ most valuable feature, however, might be their secrecy. Interview Coder is invisible to the interviewer.
While candidates are using technology to cheat, employers are observing their behavior during interviews to try to catch them. Interviewers have learned to look for eyes wandering to the side, the reflection of other apps visible on candidates’ glasses, and answers that sound rehearsed or don’t match questions, among other clues.
Perhaps the biggest tell is a simple “Hmm.”
Hiring managers said they’ve noticed that many candidates use the ubiquitous sound to buy themselves time while waiting for their AI tools to finish their work.
“I’ll hear a pause, then ‘Hmm,’ and all of a sudden, it’s the perfect answer,” said Anna Spearman, founder of Techie Staffing, an agency that helps companies fill technical roles. “There have also been instances where the code looked OK, but they couldn’t describe how they came to the conclusion.”
Henry Kirk, a software developer and co-founder of Studio.init in New York, said this type of cheating used to be easy to catch.
“But now it’s harder to detect,” said Kirk. He said the technology has gotten smart enough to present the answers in a place that doesn’t require users to move their eyes.
“The eye movement used to be the biggest giveaway,” Kirk said.
Interview Coder’s website says its virtual interview tool is immune to screen detection features that are available to companies on services such as Zoom and Google Meet. Lee markets his product as being webcam-proof.
When Kirk hosted a virtual coding challenge for an engineering job he was looking to fill in June, 700 people applied, he said. Kirk recorded the process of the first interview round. He was looking to see if any candidates were cheating in ways that included using results from large language models.
“More than 50% of them cheated,” he said.
AI cheating tools have improved so much over the last year that they’ve become nearly undetectable, experts said. Other than Lee’s Interview Coder, software engineers can also use programs such as Leetcode Wizard or ChatGPT.
Kirk said his startup is considering moving to in-person interviews, though he knows that potentially limits the talent pool.
“The problem is now I don’t trust the results as much,” Kirk said. “I don’t know what else to do other than on-site.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai during an event at the Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw, Poland, Feb. 13, 2025.
Omar Marques | Anadolu | Getty Images
Back to the Googleplex
It’s become a big topic at Google, and one Pichai addressed in February at an internal town hall meeting, where executives read questions and comments that were submitted by employees and summarized by AI, according to an audio recording that was reviewed by CNBC.
One question asked of management was, “Can we get onsite job interviews back?”
“There are many email threads about this topic,” the question said. “If budget is constraint, can we get the candidates to an office or environment we can control?”
Pichai turned to Brian Ong, Google’s vice president of recruiting, who was joining through a virtual livestream.
“Brian, do we do hybrid?” Pichai asked.
Ong said candidates and Google employees have said they prefer virtual job interviews because scheduling a video call is easier than finding a time to meet in available conference rooms. The virtual interview process is about two weeks faster, he added.
He said interviewers are instructed to probe candidates on their answers as a way to decipher whether they actually know what they’re talking about.
“We definitely have more work to do to integrate how AI is now more prevalent in the interview process,” said Ong. He said his recruiting organization is working with Google’s software engineer steering committee to figure out how the company can refine its interviewing process.
“Given we all work hybrid, I think it’s worth thinking about some fraction of the interviews being in person,” Pichai responded. “I think it’ll help both the candidates understand Google’s culture and I think it’s good for both sides.”
Ong said it’s also an issue “all of our other competitor companies are looking at.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment beyond what was said at the meeting.
Other companies have already shifted their hiring practices to account for AI cheating.
Deloitte reinstated in-person interviews for its U.K. graduate program, according to a September report.
Anthropic, the maker of AI chatbot Claude, issued new guidance in its job applications in February, asking candidates not to use AI assistants during the hiring process.
“While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process,” the new policy says. “We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.”
Amazon is also taking steps to combat AI cheating.
The company asks that candidates acknowledge that they won’t use unauthorized tools during the interview or assessment process, spokesperson Margaret Callahan told CNBC.
Chungin “Roy” Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, is the founder of Interview Coder, a startup that makes software to help computer programmers cheat in job interviews with the help of AI.
Courtesy of Chungin Lee
‘F*ck Leetcode’
If you visit InterviewCoder.co, the first thing that greets you is large gray type that reads “F*ck Leetcode.”
Leetcode is the program used by many tech companies to evaluate software engineers for technical roles. Tech companies such as Meta, Google and Amazon use it to keep tabs on the thousands of job applicants they evaluate.
“Every time I mention interviews, I get frustrated comments about Leetcode,” wrote Ryan Peterman, a software engineer at Meta, in a newsletter posted on Substack in December. Peterman said Leetcode problems are purposely designed to be much harder than what software engineers would do on the job. Leetcode is the best tool companies have to filter hundreds of applicants, Peterman wrote.
Coders said they hate Leetcode because it emphasizes algorithmic problem-solving and asks applicants to solve riddles and puzzles that seem irrelevant to the job, according to those CNBC spoke with as well as comments CNBC found from engineers across various social media platforms. Another downside is that it sometimes requires hours of work that may not result in a job offer or advancement, they said.
Leetcode served as Lee’s inspiration for building Interview Coder, he said. With the help of AI, he said, he created the service in less than a week.
“I thought I wanted to work at a big tech company and spent 600 hours practicing for Leetcode,” Lee said. “It made me miserable, and I almost stopped programming because of how much I didn’t like it.”
Lee’s social media posts are filled with comments from other programmers expressing similar frustrations.
“Legend,” several comments said in response to some of his X posts. Others said they enjoyed him “f—ing with big tech.”
Rival software Leetcode Wizard was also inspired by distaste for Leetcode.
Isabel De Vries, Leetcode Wizard’s head of marketing, told CNBC in a statement that Leetcode-style interviews fail to accurately measure engineering skills and fail to reflect actual daily engineering work.
“Our product originates from the same frustrations many of our users are having,” De Vries said.
Leetcode did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Henry Kirk, a software developer and co-founder of Studio.init in New York, is considering moving job interviews to be on site in response to software engineers using AI to cheat in virtual interviews.
Photo by Krista Schlueter for Inc. Magazine
When Kirk, of Studio.init, posted on LinkedIn in February to vent about his frustrations with AI cheating, he received nearly 200 comments. But most argued that employers should allow candidates to use AI in the hiring process.
“Even the SAT lets you use a calculator,” said one comment. “I think you just make it harder to succeed on purpose when in the real world Google and gpt will always be at my fingertips.”
Lee promotes Interview Coder as being “invisible to all screen-recording softwares.” To prove its effectiveness, he recorded himself passing an Amazon interview and posted the video on YouTube. Amazon and the other companies that had made offers to Lee then rescinded them.
Lee got hundreds of comments praising the video, which YouTube removed after CNBC reached out to Amazon and Google for this story. YouTube cited a “copyright claim” by Amazon as the reason for removing the video.
“I as an interviewer am so annoyed by him but as a candidate also adore him,” former Meta staff engineer Yangshun Tay, co-founder of startup GreatFrontEnd, wrote in a LinkedIn post about Lee and his video. “Cheating isn’t right, but oh god I am so tired of these stupid algorithm interviews.”
After YouTube removed the video, Lee uploaded it once again.
Cheating as a service
Lee said he never planned to work at Amazon, Meta or TikTok. He said he wanted to show others just how easy it is to game Leetcode and force companies to find a better alternative.
And, he said, he’s making money in the process.
Interview Coder is available as a subscription for $60 a month. Lee said the company is on track to hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-May.
He recently hired the internet influencers who go by the name “Costco Guys” to make a video marketing his software.
“If you’re struggling to pass your Leetcode interviews and want to get a job at a big tech company, you’ve got to take a look at Interviewcoder.co to pass your interview,” the Costco Guys say in their video. “Because Interview Coder gets five big booms! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boooooom!”
Leetcode Wizard bills itself on its website as “The #1 AI-powered coding interview cheating app” and “The perfect tool for achieving a ‘Strong Hire’ result in any coding interview and landing your dream job at any FAANG company.” Leetcode Wizard charges 49 euros ($53) a month for a “Pro” subscription.
More than 16,000 people have used the app, and “several hundred” people have told Leetcode Wizard that they received offers thanks to the software, the company told CNBC.
“Our product will have succeeded once we can shut it down, when leetcode interviews are a thing of the past,” De Vries said.
Lee said he’s moving from New York to San Francisco in March to continue building Interview Coder and start working on his next company.
Kirk said he understands software engineers’ frustration with Leetcode and the tech industry. He’s had to use Leetcode numerous times throughout his career, and he was laid off by Google in 2023. He now wants to help out-of-work engineers get jobs.
But he remains worried that AI cheating will persist.
“We need to make sure they know their stuff because these tools still make mistakes,” Kirk said.
Half of companies currently use AI in the hiring process, and 68% will by the end of 2025, according to an October survey commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com.
Lee said that if companies want to bill themselves as AI-first, they should encourage its use by candidates.
Asked if he worries about software engineers losing the trust of the tech industry, Lee paused.
“Hmm,” he mumbled.
“My reaction to that is any company that is slow to respond to market changes will get hurt and that’s the fault of the company,” Lee said. “If there are better tools, then it’s their fault for not resorting to the better alternative to exist. I don’t feel guilty at all for not catering to a company’s inability to adapt.”
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports11 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway