Instagram influencers are not happy with its parent company Meta right now. Many of them, who depend on Instagram for their livelihood, claim that Meta's two big layoff rounds have resulted in very little feedback in terms of customer service.
Meta announced it would let go of 11,000 of its workers in November 2022. Just a few months later, in March 2023, it revealed it would lay off an additional 10,000 workers by the end of the year. All of these job cuts have affected its customer service divisions, according to a new report on CNBC.
One of the Instagram influencers who have had huge issues since the layoffs is fashion model Katya Karlova. Since the job cuts began, she has seen her images stolen by others to create fake Instagram accounts. Some of her images were also flagged by Instagram's as being too sexual, including some that were promoting brands. By the time she was able to successfully contest the bans, her following numbers took a hit. The article states:
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.”
In another example of the lack of Meta customer service, MeLynda Rinker, a community manager for the popular Facebook group 50 Shades of Pink, saw an issue with Facebook's analytics backend. When she tried to contact Facebook she was unable to reach anyone. She stated:
“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.”
A Meta spokesperson would not offer a comment to CNBC for its article. The spokesperson reportedly did send over examples of its customer service efforts over the year, and a link to a company news post from December 2022, which talked mostly about its security efforts but did include a mention of a live chat support test on Facebook.
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