Meta’s job cuts at the company level had an impact on its customer service team, which it had just begun to build. This left group admins and influencers dealing with scammers.
Claims it has spoken with Meta employees and reviewed documents filed with the US Department of Labor. These documents show that massive layoffs occurred at Facebook and Instagram’s customer service, customer experience and communities teams. Meta laid off 11,000 workers last November, and added 10,000 workers in March.
Meta revealed its plans to create a customer service team last January. Brent Harris, Meta’s vice president for governance, stated that the company was “spending quite a lot of time” on the project at the time. Although there was no clear idea of the exact role of the customer support team, it appeared that it would assist those who had been wrongly locked out or removed from their accounts.
In 2021, the company began testing a live chat support group to help users recover their accounts. The company updated last December to say that the initiative had reached “more than one million people in nine different countries” and it was planning to expand the test to more than 30 countries. It also stated that it would “double down on” providing support to people who are locked out of accounts throughout 2023.
It’s not clear how active Meta’s customer service team is. Spoke with several businesses and influencers who reported difficulty getting in touch to Meta support regarding a variety of issues that they faced on their platforms. Received a January message from Facebook stating that the company would no longer provide dedicated support for group admins.
Meta pointed the Verge to some recent announcements about user support. These included a tool to help users recover hacked Instagram account, its efforts in improving account security and an expansion of its livechat feature.
Meta may have cut back on user support by offering a $11.99 per-month verification subscription. Meta Verified allows users to talk to a support representative about common account issues. This is a benefit that Meta has enjoyed for many years. However, Meta’s massive cuts to its support teams raises questions about how big the verified user support team will be.
The Oversight Board is an independent entity that assists Meta in content moderation decisions. claims it has received more than 1,000,000 appeals since October 2020, when it began accepting them, and December 2021. This indicates a large demand for Meta’s direct support. Meta also reportedly sanctioned dozens of employees for using the automated account recovery tool to assist customers who desperately wanted to regain their accounts.
