Microsoft announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs, approximately 5% of its workforce, as the company braces for increased economic uncertainty.
CEO Satya Nadella’s email to employees, dated Jan. 18, did not detail where the cuts would be happening, but Bloomberg reported that the layoffs will be concentrated in the engineering division.
Microsoft has been on a hiring spree in recent years, adding more than 75,000 people since 2019 as revenue grew by 58%. Now, Nadella’s announcement makes Microsoft the latest tech giant to announce slashes to its workforce, as the industry looks to cut costs.
The layoffs will be completed by the end of March, according to Microsoft’s filing with the SEC. It is the company’s largest layoffs since 2014, when it cut roughly 25,000 jobs over two years following Nokia’s misguided acquisition.
Microsoft also announced it would continue hiring in some strategic areas, including artificial intelligence research. Additionally, the company informed shareholders it would take a $1.2 billion charge in the second quarter related to severance expenses, as well as a reduction of office space and unspecified “changes to hardware portfolios.”
Quotable:
“We’re going to go through a phase today where there is some amount of normalization in demand. We will have to do more with less…we will have to show our own productivity gains with our own technology.” – Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Tech’s 2022 layoffs continue in 2023
April 27, 2022: Robinhood, the popular investing app, lays off 9% of staff.
May 5, 2022: Cameo, the celebrity shout-out app, cuts 25% of its staff after revenue falls.
June 14, 2022: Crypto exchange Coinbase cuts more than 1,000 employees.
June 23, 2022: Netflix lays off 300 employees, or 4% of its workforce.
July 18, 2022: Vimeo, the video-sharing platform, reduces its workforce by 6%.
July 26, 2022: Shopify announces layoffs affecting 10% of its workers.
August 3, 2022: SoundCloud announces plans to lay off 20% of its employees.
September 11, 2022: Snap, the parent company of video sharing app Snapchat, announces a 20% reduction in workforce.
October 20, 2022: Twitter, under new CEO Elon Musk, announces plans to lay off over 75% of its workforce.
November 3, 2023: Lyft cuts 13% of its global workforce, citing “choppy economic conditions.”
November 9, 2022: Meta announces it would lay off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce.
January 4, 2023: Salesforce, the business software company, announces plans to axe 8,000 employees, or roughly 10% of its global workforce.
January 4, 2023: Amazon anticipates job cuts for 18,000 employees, the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.
January 18, 2023: Microsoft says it plans to cut 10,000 jobs by the end of March.
Related stories:
🐦 As more tech companies lay off workers, job cuts at Twitter are poised to make more noise
🖥️ Zuck wants you to know he’s “sorry” about laying off thousands of Meta employees
📦 Amazon’s 18,000 layoffs set the tone for what hiring and firing will look like in 2023