File photo of Twitter headquarters in SoMa in San Francisco. The company plans to reduce its office footprint in the city.
Twitter has terminated its office lease in Oakland, abandoning four floors of space it planned to open in late 2022.
The social media company is also cutting its space at 1 10th Street in SoMa, where it leased several floors. The 10th Street building is attached to the company headquarters at 1355 Market St.
As the company continued to shift more of its operations to hybrid work, it began reducing its capacity in the 10th Street building in Sept. 2020, listing 104,850 square-feet for sublease. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that was for floors three to seven and now the other floors it occupies — 2,8,9 and 10 — will be vacated.
These Bay Area reductions are in tandem with Twitter’s efforts to reduce office space worldwide as part of cost-cutting measures. It will maintain offices in Tokyo, Japan, Mumbai, New Delhi, Dublin, Ireland and New York City, but reduce its footprint. It will also reconsider leases when they expire in Seoul; Wellington, New Zealand; Osaka, Japan; Madrid; Hamburg, Germany; and Utrecht, The Netherlands.
“We are evaluating our global office portfolio and re-sizing certain locations based on utilization. We’ve proven we can operate our business successfully with a distributed workforce over the years, and remain committed to our employees, our customers, and the markets we serve. These decisions do not impact our current headcount or employee roles, and we’ll continue to support and regularly meet with our customers to help them launch something new and connect with what’s happening on Twitter,” a spokesperson wrote to SFGATE.
The company announced a hiring freeze in May.
Reductions in its real estate footprint would lead to major cash savings for the company, which is facing a legal battle with Tesla CEO Elon Musk after he tried to buy the company earlier this year. After agreeing to a $44 billion sale price, Musk has since tried to renege on the deal and the two parties are expected to go to trial in the fall.
Twitter was one of the first large tech companies to embrace remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The tax breaks the company received to establish its Mid-Market offices in San Francisco expired in 2019, a 1.5% payroll tax holiday that companies received after setting up shop in the area in an effort to invest in the SoMa neighborhood.
Tessa is a Local Editor for SFGATE. Before joining the team in 2019, she specialized in food, drink and lifestyle content for numerous publications including Liquor.com, The Bold Italic, 7x7 and more. Contact her at tessa.mclean@sfgate.com.