AOL to lay off 108 tied to Reston office

AOL, the New York-based web portal and email provider, expects to lay off 108 employees connected to its Reston office at 11955 Democracy Drive, a notice sent to the state Feb. 17 stated.

Employees who work in the Reston office or report to it will be affected.

About 94 employees will lose their jobs March 1 and another 14 will lose their jobs May 31, according to the notice, which was sent in compliance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

Bumping rights do not exist, and the employees do not belong to a union.

The notice did not provide a list of affected positions. The AOL website lists the Reston address as an office where billing operations and services are handled.

In October 2025, the Italian tech company Bending Spoons announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to buy AOL from Apollo Global Management, a New York-based alternative asset manager. The price was about $1.5 billion, according to news reports.

“AOL is an iconic, beloved business that’s in good health, has stood the test of time and we believe has unexpressed potential,” Bending Spoons CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari said in an October news release. “We intend to invest significantly to help the product and the business flourish.”

The deal closed Jan. 2, according to Bending Spoons spokesperson Camilla Bettinelli. AOL employees were informed Tuesday of the layoffs.

Affected employees were offered separation packages “exceeding industry standards,” she wrote in an email.

“In our experience operating digital businesses such as Evernote, Meetup and WeTransfer, reducing organizational complexity leads to faster and more efficient product development,” Bettinelli wrote. “We’re confident that this leaner organization will set AOL up to meet the needs of its loyal customer base with greater focus and agility.”

AOL got its start in the 1980s in Tysons when Steve Case created Quantum Computer. In 1989, the company was renamed America Online, or AOL, and became the portal for many people’s first encounters with the internet in the 1990s. AOL moved its base to Loudoun County in 1996 after outgrowing its Tysons headquarters.

Known for sending out thousands of compact discs to attract potential users and offering email with the cheery “You’ve got mail!” greeting, AOL merged with Time Warner in 2001.

In 2015 Verizon made a $4.4 billion deal to buy AOL. In 2021, Apollo Global Management bought Yahoo and AOL for $5 billion.