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- Twitter has decided to sublease more than 100,000 square feet of its San Francisco headquarters as employees continue working from home.
- The space includes 878 work stations and is available to lease for up to five years.
- The decision was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
- Twitter announced in May that its employees could work from home forever if they’d like, and CEO Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said that having a decentralized workforce has been the goal for several years.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Twitter is subleasing more than 100,000 square feet of space at its San Francisco headquarters as its employees continue working from home.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Roland Li was the first to report the news.
According to the Chronicle, Twitter is offering up 104,850 square feet, which includes 878 work stations, at its headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco. Leases are available for anywhere from two to five years, the Chronicle reports.
The office, which spans 800,000 square feet in total, previously housed most of Twitter’s global workforce, which numbers over 5,000.
“Our focus on prioritizing decentralization has allowed us to flex our active leased spaces as needed,” a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider. “San Francisco is where a majority of our employees will be based for the foreseeable future, and we will continue to maintain our footprint here.”
The company said it has no plans to close any of its offices and that its decision to sublease its space is part of its ongoing focus on supporting a distributed workforce.
Twitter's decision to sublease part of its headquarters follows the company's decision in May that employees may work from home forever if they'd like, even after offices begin to reopen.
"Opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs," a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider at the time. "When we do decide to open offices, it also won't be a snap back to the way it was before. It will be careful, intentional, office by office and gradual."
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said he wants to "decentralize" Twitter's workforce, which the company had already been working on for "a year, if not two years" before the coronavirus outbreak. When he talked to startup founders these days, none of them are looking to have a Silicon Valley headquarters.
"No one wants to move to San Francisco anymore, no one can afford to live in San Francisco anymore, so they're hiring people all over the country, all over the world," Dorsey said on "The Boardroom: Out of Office" podcast in August.
Dorsey said that having a distributed workforce was "the whole promise of the internet" to begin with.
"It makes location irrelevant but yet here we are, an internet company, that's completely centralizing in San Francisco," Dorsey said. "We're not living up to the ideals of what the internet inspired us to be and what it can show."
Twitter isn't the only company rethinking its approach to physical office space as a result of the pandemic, however. Last month, Pinterest announced it had decided to cancel a massive new office in San Francisco, saying that it was "rethinking where future employees could be based" and aiming for a more distributed workforce, according to the Chronicle.