Meta cuts support staff as well: What problems Facebook, Instagram users are having?

Meta is already cutting about 21,000 jobs in four months, which has already started to affect the company's work. Among those who were laid off were also customer service specialists, as a result of which communities and users on Facebook and Instagram have been left without adequate support and begun to face a whole series of problems more often.

Katya Karlova, the owner of a popular Instagram account with 250,000 followers, complained in an interview with CNBC that the number of scammers who steal her photos, create fake accounts, and try to make money using her name has increased. She tried to get in touch with the support team of this social media platform, but, according to her, all the requests did not give results.

The problems were resolved only after she found the right people in Meta—and thanks to her personal connections.

The other person noted in this article, MeLynda Rinker, is a certified Meta community manager who oversees the Facebook group for pink lovers, which she created back in 2012. Currently, this group has about 420,000 followers who regularly post there, posting photos of pink flowers, hair, phones, and more.

In February, the system being used to track metrics on the social media platform began to show zero user activity in this group, although in fact the activity in the group continued as before.

The moderator tried to contact the support team, but the respective complaint was ignored. This moderator used to have direct access to the Groups Support service, Facebook's technical support team, but it was shut down  in January.

As in the first case, the problem was resolved only after the intervention of friends with connections at Meta.

Insider spoke with a Meta customer service representative. The woman, whose name has been withheld, works in Portugal, earning slightly more than minimum wage, although she regularly receives insults and threats from angry customers.

“I see a lot of [Meta users and customers] say 'Why is Facebook not helping us?'" she told Insider. "If we could, we would help. Facebook is literally not giving us the tools, but it's letting us take the blame.”

She added that because of the company's focus on the metaverse, it "feels like their priorities are elsewhere."

Recently, Meta has been trying its best to convince people that Facebook is not "dying" at all, and that this social media platform has 2 billion daily active users. However, the truth is that many of these users don't realize that when they post on Instagram, they're posting the same thing on Facebook, too, because they didn't realize that when they signed up for Instagram, they gave their consent for their posts to be shared on Facebook as well.

If the company doesn't fix the support issues, the number of active Facebook users is likely to drop further in the coming months.

Mark Zuckerberg had announced that the company's layoffs were part of a "year of efficiency," during which Meta will cut costs after the disappointing results of the fourth quarter in 2022. In turn, Insider recalls that Meta's Reality Lab division, which develops the metaverse, had a loss of $13.7 billion last year.