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GeekWire reported that the outfit wants to acquire space that could house up to 200 employees. Facebook’s current Seattle office holds approximately 40 employees.
The Seattle office is the first Facebook location outside Palo Alto, California, where engineering operations take place.
When Facebook first set up its Seattle operation, Facebook Site Director Ari Steinberg wrote: “Seattle has a strong history of innovation and is home to thousands of talented technical people who we want to help us solve the challenges of designing and building the next generation of Facebook”.
A host of internet companies, including Microsoft, Expedia and Amazon, have large operations in the area, and recently Zynga announced it would move into 7,000 square feet of office space in the city.
Facebook’s expansion in Seattle comes as the company looks to enlarge its operations across the board. In the next few months, Facebook will move to a state-of-the-art new headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
By 2017, Facebook plans to have about 9,400 employees.
Meanwhile, Facebook has integrated facial recognition technology from Israeli company face.com, a world leader in the field.
The new technology will help Facebook users identify and tag people on the site.
Rival company Google recently acquired PittPatt, another world leader in facial recognition technology.
Google will use the technology in Google+, its own social networking site launched in competition with Facebook. Google+ already has 20 million users.
Editor’s notes: In July 2021, GeekWire revealed that Facebook had signed a lease for further office space in the Seattle area.
The company had agreed on a pre-lease deal to rent more space in the Spring District development in Bellevue, Washington. The deal secured Block 5, which is an 11-story, 345,000-square-foot office building scheduled to open in 2023.
The company had already signed leases for more than 800,000 square feet of office space across three buildings being developed in the Spring District – Blocks 6, 16, and 24.
At the time, Facebook already rented 3.3 million square feet of office space and employed 7,000 people in the Seattle area.
Google decommissioned Google+ on April 2, 2019. Google cited low user engagement and difficulties in “creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers’ expectations”. It noted that 90 per cent of user sessions on the service lasted less than five seconds.
In October 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta.
In August 2026, it was reported that Meta planned to continue offering more office space for sublease in the Bellevue market.
Meta also went through multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023 and 2026 as the company shifted its focus toward AI, shrinking its headcount in the region to 5,600.
Meta planned to occupy seven buildings in the Spring District development, but after revealing in August 2026 that it would back out of the 212,000-square-foot Block 13, it has offered three of those seven buildings for sublease.