Facebook Laying Off 548 More Employees In NYC

MIDTOWN, NY — Nearly 550 New York City workers will be laid off from Mark Zuckerberg's social media conglomerate, according to a layoff notice filed last week.

548 employees at Meta — formerly known as Facebook — will soon be jobless as part of the company's belt-tightening announced last November.

According to the notice, the affected employees will be terminated on Aug. 25, part of "a second phase of layoffs."

A representative with Facebook declined to comment.

Along with two other layoff notices, Meta has made at least 1,762 New Yorkers jobless — over 30 percent of their currently-listed 5,634 workers in the city, reads the May 24 notice.

The notice cited economic reasons for the layoffs.

Affected offices include a 730,000-square-foot space within the James A. Farley building above Moynihan Station, a prominent edifice across the street from Penn Station, where Facebook executives signed a 2020 lease that former Mayor Bill de Blasio hailed as the first major lease of the coronavirus pandemic.

In that same announcement in April 2020, de Blasio said the deal would bring Facebook's total number of Big Apple workers to 10,000.

"Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected," Zuckerberg wrote in his layoff announcement last fall.

Facebook only moved into the Farley building last fall.

About a month after the move-in, Zuckerberg, announced he would be eliminating about 13 percent of his workforce — or 11,000 employees — from Meta.

178 of the 2,339 people working inside the Farley building are affected by the latest notice.

188 workers at the nearby Hudson Yards office, at 30 Hudson Yards, will lose their jobs.

And at their Astor Place office, inside 770 Broadway, 182 of 2,336 workers will be terminated.

In that letter to employees last November, Zuckerberg wrote that he expanded the company as COVID-19 shutdowns appeared to herald permanent shifts in e-commerce.

Zuckerberg, 39, who called the layoffs "sad," is worth nearly $96 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Meta employees are not represented by a union, the notices states. But according to Zuckerberg's announcement, all affected people will be entitled to 16 weeks of severance at base pay — plus two weeks for every year of employment, all PTO paid out, six months of health insurance coverage and other benefits.