Meta is laying off 331 workers in the Puget Sound region as part of broader cuts to its virtual reality division.

The Facebook parent company last week said that it was cutting about 10% of its 15,000-employee Reality Labs division as it shifts resources away from what it called the metaverse to wearables like smart glasses.

This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year," Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said.

Reality Labs has been a key part of Meta's postpandemic growth in the Seattle area. The company expanded its offices in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood and Sodo district, Bellevue's Spring District and at a sprawling office cluster in Redmond's Willows area.

Of the 331 people laid off, 105 were based in Redmond, according to a state regulatory filing Tuesday. Another 129 were spread across Seattle and Bellevue, while 97 employees were designated as remote but based in Washington.

Data provided by the state shows that workers on Reality Labs' research and metaverse content teams were affected along with those working on Horizon, the virtuality reality platform that Meta used to advertise its metaverse ambitions in 2021.

The company rebranded to Meta Platforms from Facebook in late 2021 as it pivoted to virtual and augmented reality services. Over the next few years Meta pumped billions into the Reality Labs divisions. In the company's most recent financial results, it reported Reality Labs had lost almost $13.2 billion for the first nine months of 2025, up from the same period in 2024.

In 2022, in the middle of Meta's fast growth to more than 8,000 employees in the Puget Sound region, then-Pacific Northwest lead Paresh Rajwat said the road to the metaverse "passes through Seattle. He also said the Seattle area was the company's largest hub outside of its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

Since then, the company has cooled its once red-hot expansion in the area. Meta backed out on occupying two office buildings in Bellevue's Spring District and offered them for sublease in 2023 and 2024. Last year, it let expansion rights for five other development sites in the tech-focused neighborhood lapse, according to King County records.

Meta also vacated one of its older offices in South Lake Union, a 190,000-square-foot space that has since been snapped up by Apple.

The company did complete the Frank Gehry-designed Building X, a major piece of its Redmond offices, in 2023 but has mothballed plans for a similarly large Building Z nearby.

Meta's layoffs are the latest to hit the local tech industry over the past year of cuts, including some made by the company in October that hit its artificial intelligence teams.

The state's two largest tech employers, Amazon and Microsoft, have accounted for most of the region's layoffs. Amazon let go of more than 2,300 Seattle-area employees in October and Microsoft cut 3,160 jobs in the state last year.

Amazon said its layoffs could continue into 2026 as the company trims the redundant hedges of its corporate workforce. Though rumors swirled earlier this year of more expansive cuts at Microsoft, the company's chief communications officer said those were false.

Meta layoffs in Washington by location

Redmond – 105 employees

Bellevue – 89 employees

Seattle – 40 employees

Remote – 97 employees

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