Microsoft likely to layoff thousands of employees: Report

According to reports cited by the UK broadcaster Sky News, Microsoft Corp. is considering eliminating 11,000 jobs, or around 5% of its total workforce.

According to a report by Bloomberg, the company intends to reduce the number of engineering divisions through new rounds of layoffs.

Microsoft now joins other tech giant in announcing layoffs in response to a weakening market and a failing economy.

Microsoft reportedly let go of less than 1,000 workers across many divisions earlier in October. Less than 1% of the more than 200,000 employees of the software company were affected by these cuts. The company had said in July that a modest number of positions had been cut and that it would eventually hire more people.

As of June 30, the company employed 221,000 full-time employees, including 122,000 in the US and 99,000 abroad, according to filings.

After several quarters of a slowdown in the personal computer market impacted Windows and device sales, the company, according to Reuters, is under pressure to sustain growth rates at its cloud unit Azure.

On January 24, Microsoft is expected to announce its quarterly results.

For thousands of tech workers, the start of the new year has a dismal tone due to worldwide layoffs. More than 30,000 individuals had lost their employment globally in less than a week in 2023. By the way, this is almost twice as many workers as were fired throughout the entire month of December 2022. According to data from Layoffs Tracker, 30 organisations have fired 30,611 individuals in total over the first six days of January. In addition to Amazon, the list also includes many other companies, such as cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, tech giant Salesforce, and video hosting platform Vimeo.

This statistic includes a sizable fraction of the over 18,000 positions that Amazon.com Inc. decided to eliminate as part of a workforce reduction. The 11,000 layoffs announced by Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., last year have now been surpassed by the Jeff Bezos-owned company.