Facebook hit by outage after parent company Meta sacks 13% of its workforce

Multiple users in various parts of the world reported a brief outage of the social networking platform Facebook, just a day after its parent company Meta laid off more than 11,000 of its workforce. According to online outage portal Downdetector, reports of Facebook being down spiralled at around 9 am on Thursday, with several people reporting that they had trouble logging into their Facebook accounts. Some also experienced problems in accessing the platform’s creator studio and ads manager feature. 

Soon after, users flocked to the alternative social networking platform Twitter, where they uploaded memes to quip about the issue. One user mocked Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and compared him to the fictional character Pinocchio. “One of the only times i come to twit land is when Facebook is down, Musky must be loving this! Hey, ever seen Zuck and Pinocchio in the same room? Psst, he's not a real human!” the user wrote. 

Another user said, “Day begins with major disruptions in Facebook Ads Manager!” A third user wrote, “blue check chaos on Twitter, Facebook ads are down, everyone is baffled by the new notes feature on Instagram. I work in social media. can I finish work early today please?” Meta is yet to comment on the issue and provide clarity. However, a few users have claimed that some services have been partially restored.

Meta fires a large chunk of its workforce

The outage comes a day after Meta fired about 11,000 of its employees across the world in a bid to decrease the total workforce by 13%. In a letter addressed to the affected employees, Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote: "Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.”

“We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1,” he said in the letter, adding that he takes accountability for all the decisions made so far that have brought this situation to the horizon. Zuckerberg then acknowledged that “this is tough for everyone,” and went on to apologise to those impacted by the job cuts.