Meta targeted older workers in layoffs, lawsuit by former senior director for company claims

Ethan Baron, The Mercury News on Mar 20, 2026

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When Menlo Park, California, social media giant Meta executed a plan to slash 5% of its workforce last year, it laid off older workers at much higher rates than younger employees, a lawsuit by one of those workers claims.

Nicolas Franchet alleged in his lawsuit that he was one victim of a purge that saw workers 50 and over take the hardest hit, followed by those 40 and up.

“Employees 40 and older were 1.5 times as likely to be included in the layoffs than employees under 40, and employees 50 and older were 2.5 times as likely to be terminated than employees under 40,” the lawsuit claimed, citing “data the company provided to terminated employees.”

Meta declined to comment on the lawsuit, or answer questions including whether it disputed the purported termination rates among older employees.

Franchet, a San Francisco resident who worked for Meta there and at its Menlo Park headquarters, was laid off in February 2025 at age 54 after spending about 13 years at the firm — Facebook and Instagram’s parent — and rising to a senior director position, according to his wrongful-termination lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco County Superior Court.

“Throughout his career at Meta, Mr. Franchet was a star performer who earned positive performance evaluations from his supervisors, peers, and direct reports,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit highlights long-running claims that age discrimination is rampant in the Silicon Valley tech industry. In 2023, Silicon Valley tech icon HP and its spinoff Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed to pay $18 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing them of of a long-running, company-wide purge of older workers.

In 2019, Google agreed to pay $11 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming it denied jobs to hundreds of older workers between 2007 and 2013.

In 2022, a federal appeals court shut down on procedural grounds a 2019 class-action lawsuit by former IBM employees who claimed the technology giant targeted “gray hairs” and “old heads” for negative performance reviews so it could oust them from the company as it formed a “Millennial Corps” and focused on hiring “early professionals.” The court said the plaintiffs could file individual cases, but court records indicate they have not.

Franchet is seeking unspecified damages, along with compensation for millions of dollars in stock grants he allegedly lost by getting laid off before they vested and became available to him.

The bulk of those shares, called “restricted stock units,” were given to Franchet in 2023 in a special award that merited a letter from CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling him, “Selection for this equity award was reserved for a very small number of people and your meaningful impact has been recognized by the highest levels of company leadership,” the lawsuit said.

In January 2025, Zuckerberg announced in an internal staff memo that “performance-based layoffs” across the company were coming, the lawsuit noted. Around the same time, the company, which made $60 billion in profit last year according to regulatory filings, introduced a new employee-rating option that allowed managers to flag workers as “lowest performers,” the lawsuit claimed.

“It was used to identify which employees would be terminated on February 10, 2025,” the lawsuit alleged.

Franchet received the lowest-performer rating and lost his job, the lawsuit said.

“Mr. Franchet’s unlawful termination by Meta caused him significant financial losses and adversely impacted his career trajectory as he entered his mid-50s,” the lawsuit said. “Mr. Franchet had no plans to leave Meta; indeed, he had already worked there for 13 years and had worked diligently to help the company grow exponentially.”

On the day he was laid off, the lawsuit claimed, Franchet’s 16,353 unvested Meta shares were worth almost $12 million.