People Keep Running into Glass Walls and Doors at Apple Park

At Apple headquarters in California, employees are running into glass walls. That’s not a metaphor, either. People keep literally walking into walls and doors made of glass at the stunning Apple Park campus.

That’s according to a new report by MarketWatch, which cited documents and sources within Apple. True to Apple’s building aesthetic, much of the interior at Apple Park is made of glass panes, including walls and doors. While that design may look stunning and clean, employees at the Cupertino campus keep running into the glass architecture.

The problem becomes even worse because, reportedly, many Apple employees are glued to their iPhone’s screens while walking around. In fact, the first day that Apple Park opened, as many as seven people injured themselves by walking into glass doors.

And in the early days of the campus’ operations, at least two incidents of people walking into walls were severe enough to warrant calling 911, according to documents obtained by MarketWatch. Luckily, while minor cuts were sustained, neither injury required hospitalization.

To mitigate the accidents, many staff members took to sticking Post-It notes onto the glass doors to make their existence more apparent. But the notes were apparently removed because they “distracted” from the building’s design, sources familiar with the situation told Time.

While the situation may seem pretty amusing and humorous, Apple may actually be violating California workplace regulations. State law specifically requires staff members to be “protected against the hazard of walking through glass by barriers or by conspicuous durable markings.”

Despite the reported incidents, there have apparently been no complaints thus far filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In addition, another source within Apple told Time that there actually are markings on some of the glass panes. So the issue may actually just be a result of people staring at their phones constantly.

Apple Park officially opened last year, but employees did not begin moving into the building en masse until early this year. The campus has been touted as a significant architectural achievement, Time reported. The vision for the “spaceship” campus was dreamt up by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs much earlier, but the futuristic headquarters wasn’t completed until recently.

“While it is a technical marvel to make glass at this scale, that’s not the achievement,” Apple design chief Jony Ive said of the building in a 2017 interview with Wired. “The achievement is to make a building where so many people can connect and collaborate and walk and talk.”

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