Bulletins

Facebook postpones reopening until January

Facebook's office in Menlo Park

Facebook will reopen its Bay Area office... someday.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Facebook won't call its employees back to the office until January, the company announced Thursday.

The social media giant still hopes to go ahead with reopening some offices before the end of the year, but a number of locations in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa will remain closed for a while longer.

"Data, not dates, is what drives our approach for returning to the office," Facebook spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in a statement. "Given the recent health data showing rising COVID cases based on the delta variant, our teams in the U.S. will not be required to go back to the office until January 2022."

Facebook began reopening its U.S. offices this spring and was planning to boost office capacity to 50% next month, with hopes to fully reopen in October. Now, the company joins Amazon, DoorDash, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Twilio in not reopening until January.

Asana, Lyft and Airbnb have set their reopenings even later in 2022, while Apple, Google, Microsoft and Uber all hope to reopen in October.

 Allison Levitsky
Allison Levitsky is a reporter at Protocol covering workplace issues in tech. She previously covered big tech companies and the tech workforce for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Allison grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley.
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Bulletins