After having overextended themselves with a pandemic hiring spree, Big Tech companies—Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Lyft and others—are now pairing layoffs with jettisoning office space.

Either they are trying to get out of their leases or sublet, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Technology companies have 30 million square feet of office space available for sublet, more than triple the 9.5 million square feet they had available in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to CBRE.

Offices have a 12.5% vacancy rate, up from 9.6% in 2019 and the highest since 2011, according to CoStar Group Inc. All told, there is 212 million square feet of sublease space on the market.

Unlike the sudden collapse of the dot-com crash in 2001, this pullback is bigger, due to the extent to which Big Tech companies went on an unabated hiring spree in the past few years, executives say.

Even in 2021, when companies were in a tug-and-pull with employees over working from home versus returning to the office, technology companies sought out prime space in high-end office towers, to attract talent in the tight labor market.

The repercussions could be significant on the financial system, since office buildings account for $1.2 trillion of the $5.4 trillion in total commercial real estate debt, according to Trepp Inc. data.

In fact, technology giants acquired a number of prized office buildings in the past few years, including Amazon buying the former Lord & Taylor department store in New York for $978 million and Facebook, a campus in Bellevue, Wash., for $368 million.

Real estate executives are not happy about the downsides for big cities like New York and San Francisco. Nor are they holding their breath.

As Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, puts it, “The layoffs are starting to gain momentum.”