Amid layoffs, Dan Levy, the advertising product executive at Meta, will leave the company. This move is part of the months-long pruning of projects and staff. The senior executive has been in Meta for 14 years and is currently the vice president of business messaging.
Levy announced his departure from the social media network in an internal announcement, cited by Reuters. After losing a child to leukemia, the Meta veteran said he wanted to focus on family. Despite Levy leaving, Meta confirmed that business messaging would remain a strategic priority for the company this year.
Levy previously ran Meta's ads and business products division, but was replaced by John Hegeman last year. That larger unit oversaw Meta's adaptation to Apple Inc's iOS privacy changes in 2021, which cut Meta's access to valuable user data. The division has tried to improve ads targeting precision with mixed success by using artificial intelligence and building in-app commerce features.
Meta has conducted two rounds of mass layoffs within a period of five months. In the first round, the company fired 11,000 employees in November. In the second round of layoffs, Mark Zuckerberg announced that 10,000 more employees will be losing their jobs. The CEO, in a memo sent to employees, said that this is Meta's Year of Efficiency Some employees revealed that they had nothing to do at the company in the past few months, especially in the sphere of recruitment and still they were getting paid highly $190,000 in one instance. Read more about it here: Fired Meta employee shares how she did no work in 6 months.