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Bengaluru: Indians on H-1B visas who were laid off by Meta have 60 days to secure another US job or they should change their visa status to stay in the country. Meta began sending layoff emails on May 20 after announcing plans to cut 10 per cent of its workforce, impacting 8,000 employees.
Though the exact number of Indians on H-1B visas, who have been laid off in Meta, is not known, many have exchanged somber messages on social media.
“An Indian engineer at Meta gets the layoff email at 11pm Bengaluru time. His wife is on H-4. His kid is in 3rd grade in Seattle. His H-1B clock just started ticking — 60 days. This is what AI transformation actually looks like for 2 lakh Indians abroad. AI impact on Indians abroad is highest,” a startup founder posted on X.
Meta, which sent lay-off notices to many employees as early as 4 am, has reportedly reassigned close to another 7,000 employees to AI initiatives.
Gary Tay, who works as AdTech Business support engineer at Meta, on LinkedIn said, “Yesterday I was training up my new pod engineer, glad I managed to squeeze in everything. Today. I’m laid off. 3,544 days (9yrs,~9mths). Hired in London, retrenched in Singapore. Longer than 99.5 per cent of current employees globally. 99.9 per cent longer than anyone in the APAC office. Grateful for the chance to be part of Facebook early days.”
“Not many Singaporeans can say they have been an engineer at Meta & Microsoft for over 15yrs. This year was exceptional. Spent a huge amount of time retraining myself with AI and developing systems for the teams. Speed up workload by 2-300 per cent while still keeping SLA with the world’s largest clients. AI is here to stay, apparently the human isn’t. I’ll be reassessing my career options in the next few months,” he added on LinkedIn.
If laid off employees could not find another job, they will try to switch temporarily to a B-1 or B-2 visitor visa.
Many tech giants are laying off employees as they are restructuring and focusing on AI initiatives and AI-focused roles. Apart from Meta, Amazon too announced that it would cut 16,000 roles globally. Currently, over 3 lakh Indian professionals work in the US on H-1B visas and they account for over 70 per cent of all active H-1B visa holders.