A wave of tech-sector layoffs continues to hit Seattle. Meta announced the cuts of hundreds of employees in the region as part of its strategic pullback from loss-making metaverse projects. Those reductions, along with layoffs at other giants, have pushed the region’s unemployment rate above the national average, underscoring its dependence on a volatile industry.
Hundreds laid off at Meta: end of the metaverse era in Seattle?
Meta, the owner of Facebook, continues to cut staff in the Seattle area, delivering another blow to the local tech industry. These layoffs are part of a broader strategic refocusing by the social media giant as it pivots away from ambitious but unprofitable virtual-reality projects toward more practical devices.
According to an official notice filed with the state of Washington, Meta is laying off 331 employees in the Puget Sound region. The cuts hit the Reality Labs unit, long a core part of the company’s post-pandemic growth in the area. As Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told The Seattle Times, this is part of a plan to reduce roughly 10% of Reality Labs staff, which employs about 15,000 people. The aim is to reallocate resources from building the metaverse to producing wearable devices like smart glasses. “We plan to reinvest the savings to support growth in wearables later this year,” Clayton said.
The geography of the layoffs shows how deeply Meta has embedded itself in the region. Redmond was the hardest hit, with 105 employees affected, followed by Bellevue (89), Seattle (40) and 97 remote employees living in Washington. State data indicate the cuts affected Reality Labs research teams, metaverse content developers and the Horizon platform — the virtual social platform that became a symbol of the company’s metaverse ambitions in 2021. Recall that in late 2021 Facebook rebranded to Meta Platforms, betting on virtual and augmented reality. In the years since, the company poured billions into Reality Labs, but the division remained deeply unprofitable: in the latest financial results its losses for the first nine months of 2025 totaled nearly $13.2 billion, more than for the same period in 2024.
These cuts mark a sharp reversal from the optimistic statements made only a few years ago. In 2022, amid Meta’s rapid expansion to more than 8,000 employees in the Puget Sound, then-head of the company in the Pacific Northwest Paresh Rajwat said “the road to the metaverse runs through Seattle,” calling the area the company’s largest hub outside its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. But since then the company’s enthusiasm has cooled. Meta gave up leases on two office buildings in Bellevue’s Spring District and put them up for sublease in 2023 and 2024. Last year, according to King County records, the company also let expansion rights lapse for five other sites in the tech district. Meta also vacated one of its older South Lake Union offices in Seattle — a 190,000-square-foot space later taken by Apple. While the company completed Frank Gehry–designed building X in Redmond in 2023, plans for a similarly scaled building Z nearby were frozen.
The Meta layoffs are the latest in a string of job cuts that have shaken the local tech sector over the past year. The state’s two largest tech employers, Amazon and Microsoft, have also carried out large reductions: Amazon cut more than 2,300 jobs in the Seattle area in October, and Microsoft eliminated 3,160 positions in the state last year. Amazon warned that cuts could continue into 2026, while Microsoft denied rumors of new large-scale layoffs. These developments point to a broader trend: tech giants that expanded rapidly during the pandemic are now trimming staff and strategies in response to economic challenges and shifting priorities. For Meta, this means a painful but seemingly necessary retreat from the costly metaverse vision toward more tangible products that can generate profit in the near term.
Tech layoffs push Seattle unemployment above 5%
At the start of 2026, the Seattle region faced a new wave of tech-sector layoffs that led to a noticeable rise in local unemployment. The trend sets the region apart from the national picture and highlights its dependence on big tech.
The first major layoff of the year in the tech industry was the elimination of about 330 positions at Meta in the Seattle area, revealed in an official notice filed with the Washington State Employment Department. That event is part of an ongoing series of sector layoffs, and more cuts at other companies are expected in the coming weeks. The steady flow of such news has already had a tangible impact on the labor market. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area rose to 5.1% in November, above the national rate of 4.5%. As Jeremy Warren, director of impact at the King County Workforce Development Council (WDC), explained to kuow.org, the cause lies in the unique makeup of the local economy. “It’s driven by the concentration of industries we have here, some of the largest in our region, like the information sector,” he noted. The high share of employment in tech makes the region especially vulnerable to fluctuations in that sector.
The numbers underscore the seriousness of the situation. According to the WDC index, nearly 13,000 people were laid off in the Seattle–King County region in 2025, with more than half coming from the information sector, which includes tech companies, software development and related services. “That’s 13,000 people who will be looking for work… trying either to get back into the labor market or to gain new skills,” Warren emphasized. “Just in King County. That’s a big number of people.” These data point to a deep structural adjustment facing the local labor market. Expected additional cuts in the industry could exacerbate the trend, creating challenges both for workers who must retrain or change fields and for employment services and retraining programs. Thus, the current situation in Seattle serves as a stark example of how a region’s mono-industrial dependence on a high-revenue but volatile sector can quickly turn into a socio-economic problem requiring coordinated efforts to diversify the economy and support displaced workers’ transitions.
Meta cuts hundreds of employees in the Seattle area: another blow to the tech sector
The wave of layoffs in the tech industry continues: Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced the layoff of 331 employees in the Seattle area. This is part of a global plan to reduce headcount by 10%, reflecting an ongoing correction in the tech labor market after a period of rapid pandemic-era growth.
According to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) that companies must file for mass layoffs, cuts will affect several offices in Washington state. The hardest hit offices are in Redmond (about 105 employees) and Bellevue (about 89 employees). In Seattle, roughly 40 workers at two offices will be laid off, and nearly 100 remote employees residing in Washington will also lose their jobs. The layoffs are scheduled for March 20 and will span a wide range of departments, though most positions are software-related. Content specialists, product designers and managers will also be affected.
All affected employees were given 60 days’ notice in letters from Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer. As The Puget Sound Business Journal reports, the decision is part of the company’s strategy to improve efficiency after a period of heavy metaverse investments that did not yield expected returns. For the Seattle region, one of the United States’ key tech hubs alongside Silicon Valley, these cuts are another worrying signal. Other giants, such as Amazon and Microsoft, have taken similar steps, pointing to a broader trend of cost optimization amid economic uncertainty, high interest rates and shifting investor priorities.
The consequences of these layoffs could be significant for the local economy given Meta’s high wages and their effect on the housing market and services. While the tech sector remains a backbone of Washington’s economy, repeated waves of layoffs raise questions about its resilience in a new reality where companies prioritize profitability over growth at any cost. For the affected employees, it means not only losing jobs but also having to compete in an oversaturated labor market with thousands of other highly skilled professionals who have been laid off from major tech firms over the past 18 months.
