A squirrel escaped inside Meta’s Bangkok office this week, ran through the workplace for at least 20 minutes and scratched a janitor before it was caught, according to an internal memo reviewed by WIRED.
The incident was small in physical damage and large in internal comedy value. WIRED reported that staff across Meta seized on the episode after months of heavier news inside the company, including restructurings, layoffs and an employee-data program for AI training that was launched without workers’ initial consent.
The memo said the animal arrived at the office inside a package. A janitor working for a cleaning company accepted the delivery, and the squirrel later got free inside the building, where some of Meta’s regional teams are based, according to WIRED.
The worker was scratched on a finger, received first aid and was later taken to a hospital for a medical check, the memo said. The squirrel was eventually captured. The memo did not say why the animal had been sent to the office or where it went after the capture.
Meta declined to comment to WIRED.
The internal memo also said the janitor “responsible for bringing the animal onto the premises” acknowledged misconduct and agreed to follow office rules so the same kind of incident would not happen again, according to WIRED. That is the corporate-process version of a squirrel in a box: identify the human workflow, log the failure, promise compliance.
New York Times reporter Mike Isaac first flagged the incident Tuesday in a post on X, saying employees were having fun with it internally. Isaac wrote that one person had created an AI-generated video styled like an HR training course about office best practices for squirrel encounters. His post did not identify Bangkok as the location or describe the janitor’s role, details WIRED later reported from the memo.
The squirrel episode landed during a rough stretch for Meta employees. WIRED has reported that company leaders have acknowledged poor morale and have tried to improve it with funded social events involving alcohol and promised improvements to office food, citing current employees and an internal memo.
Food has been a sore point before. Some Meta workers have complained in recent years that healthier snacks, including nuts, were removed or reduced and replaced with options such as chips, according to WIRED. The Bangkok memo did not say whether the squirrel found anything edible during its brief office run.
WIRED also noted that some people keep squirrels as pets or eat their meat, but the memo did not explain whether either fact had anything to do with this delivery. For Meta, the confirmed mechanics are narrower: package accepted, animal escaped, cleaner scratched, memo sent, jokes generated.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
