PALO ALTO, California — Snap has decided to chop nearly 500 jobs in California, including scores of layoffs in the Bay Area, a brutal round of cost-cutting ushered in by a string of setbacks in the financial results for the Snapchat owner.
In a series of official notices posted with state labor officials, Snap revealed it has cut 485 jobs in California, of which 84 were in the Bay Area, formal WARN filings showed.
The camera and social media company cut 44 jobs in Palo Alto and 40 positions in San Francisco, according to official company filings with the state Employment Development Department.
An estimated 401 job cuts occurred at the Snap offices in Santa Monica, the EDD filing shows.
“We informed employees of an impending layoff at Snap Inc.’s location in Palo Alto at 395 Page Mill Road, third floor,” Scott Withycombe, vice president of Talent with Snap, wrote in the WARN notice to the EDD.
The Palo Alto notice was similar, other than the number of employees affected, to the WARN letters sent to the EDD regarding the cutbacks in Santa Monica and San Francisco.
Snap, which owns the popular Snapchat platform, said that in all three instances, the layoffs would not affect everyone at the three respective locations.
In 2021, Snap reached an agreement to sublease 45,000 square feet of space at 395 Page Mill Road from Cloudera, a creator of cloud-based data services and a tenant in the Palo Alto office building.
The 45,000 square feet of Palo Alto office space is large enough to accommodate 225 workers. However, it wasn’t clear how many workers Snap moved into the 395 Page Mill building or how many are located there now.
The job cuts were effective on Sept. 1, the WARN notices state.
“We expect the layoffs to be permanent,” Snap stated in the WARN notice.
