Microsoft announces 10,000 job cuts in latest big tech lay-off
10,000 employee positions have been axed
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Microsoft job cuts
📣 Microsoft has announced major job cuts
🪓 10,000 positions will be axed across the company
🌊 It follows a wave of big tech layoffs in the last few months
📉 Tech giants are responding to signs of a global economic slowdown
Microsoft has announced it will be cutting 10,000 jobs worldwide, accounting for slightly less than 5% of its total workforce.
In a blog post, the company said the lay-offs had been made in the face of a global economic slowdown as “organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one”.
CEO Satya Nadella said that although Microsoft had benefited from high consumer spending during the pandemic, the drop off in tech sales prompted the company to scale back.
“When I think about this moment in time, the start of 2023, it’s showtime – for our industry and for Microsoft,” Nadella said.
“As a company, our success must be aligned to the world’s success. That means every one of us and every team across the company must raise the bar and perform better than the competition to deliver meaningful innovation that customers, communities, and countries can truly benefit from. If we deliver on this, we will emerge stronger and thrive long into the future; it’s as simple as that.”
Original story: Microsoft is reportedly planning to announce thousands of layoffs later this week, with many of the jobs expected to be cut in the company’s human resources and engineering departments.
According to Sky News, Microsoft is preparing to axe roughly 5% of its 220,000-strong workforce, equating to around 11,000 jobs – 6,000 of which will likely be in the UK.
Bloomberg reports that many of those layoffs will be made in the company’s engineering divisions, and although their scale has not yet been officially confirmed, one source familiar with the matter said they expected the cuts to be significantly larger than similar reductions made last year.
In October last year, Microsoft quietly laid off 1,000 employees, including staff from its Xbox division, and earlier in July it cut less than 1% of its total workforce as part of structural realignments.
It follows the recent trend of big tech companies announcing major job cuts in the face of a global economic slowdown. Meta announced 11,000 layoffs last year, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg citing over-optimism with the company’s growth spurring unsustainable staffing, and Twitter axed almost 50% of its total workforce after Elon Musk bought the platform.
Earlier this month, Amazon too revealed its plans to cut 18,000 jobs, about 6% of its workforce, while cloud-based software company Salesforce said it would axe 8,000 positions.
“We did have a lot of acceleration during the pandemic, and there’s some amount of normalization of that demand. And on top of it, there is a real recession in some parts of the world,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told CNBC earlier this year.
An official announcement about the job cuts will likely be made before the company’s next quarterly earnings report to investors on January 24 next week. It will also announce more details of this year’s biggest Xbox releases a day after during the new Developer_Direct showcase.
Microsoft also has regulators to contend with. Its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard is still facing scrutiny by the FTC, and EU regulators are now expected to make an antitrust warning on top. But Activision appears confident it will pass.