TikTok Lays Off 250 Employees: 145,000-Square-Foot Nashville Office Shuts After Just Two Years

TikTok is closing its Nashville office and laying off 250 employees, ending a US expansion it launched two years ago. The office will shut permanently on 5 October, removing the company's entire local workforce.

The layoffs and the closure were recorded in a WARN notice filed with the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. The 250 roles cover every member of staff at the Music Row site, including part of TikTok's content-moderation team.

Under the federal WARN Act, large employers must give 60 days' notice before mass layoffs, which is why the October closure was disclosed in early August.

'We have decided to close our Nashville office to streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth,' said Zanna Crowley, a spokesperson for the TikTok USDS Joint Venture. 'We remain fully committed to providing secure, safe, and positive experiences for the 200 million Americans that create, discover, and connect with what they love on TikTok.'

TikTok did not give a detailed reason for the closure or say whether artificial intelligence was a factor. It has not said whether any of the 250 roles will move to its other US offices.

Moore Building Office Closes on 5 October

TikTok leased space in the Moore Building, a 16-storey tower in Nashville's Music Row district, in 2024. It took nearly 145,000 square feet across the top five floors, nearly tripling its office footprint in the city, and spent several million dollars fitting out the space. Building permits filed at the time included a $1.8M (£1.3M) staircase linking three of the floors, and the lease was among the largest office deals in Nashville that year.

The building itself changed hands in July, when Shorenstein Investment Advisers bought the property from developer Portman Holdings for $146.5M (£109M). The 245,826-square-foot tower, completed in 2023, counts law firms among its other tenants, and TikTok was the anchor tenant at the time of the sale. Before moving to Music Row, the company had worked in Nashville for several years, initially from a downtown WeWork, and had used the tower as one of its regional US headquarters.

The 2024 expansion had drawn criticism from Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, who said TikTok's then-Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. The Nashville site was one of several offices TikTok and parent company ByteDance opened or grew across the US that year, in cities including Silicon Valley, Seattle, Texas, and New York.

AI, Content Moderation, and a New US Ownership Structure

The job cuts come as social media companies increase their use of artificial intelligence to detect and remove violent and explicit content, work once handled by human moderators. The change has coincided with job losses on trust-and-safety and moderation teams across the technology industry. TikTok said in 2023 that it employed about 7,000 people in the United States, with its main base in Culver City, California.

TikTok has also pulled back elsewhere in its business. It closed its standalone TikTok Music streaming service in November 2024 and cut about 15 roles across its US and Latin American music teams in October 2025.

The closure follows a change to TikTok's US ownership. Earlier this year, ByteDance separated the app's North American business into a US-based joint venture, satisfying a 2024 federal law that required TikTok's US operations to be split from its Chinese parent on national security grounds or face a nationwide ban. The deal was completed in January.

The venture is backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX. Non-Chinese investors hold about 80% of the business, while ByteDance retains just under 20%. The US company licenses TikTok's recommendation algorithm from ByteDance.

TikTok says its platform reaches 200 million users and 7.5 million businesses in the United States.