Summary
Microsofthas announced major layoffs that will see it cut approximately 3% of its global workforce. The move will eliminate thousands of positions and impact multipleMicrosoftdivisions.
A significant portion of the tech industry has carried out major workforce reductions in the years following the pandemic boom.Microsoft has largely followed this layoff trend, cutting hundreds or thousands of jobs on multiple occasions since 2023. Most recently, the Redmond-based tech giant conducted a minor downsizing in January 2025, when it eliminated roles across its sales, security, and gaming divisions.
A much larger round of layoffs is now in the works,CNBCreports, citing a statement from a Microsoft spokesperson. The group intends to cut approximately 3% of its workforce, a company representative said. As of June 2024, Microsoft employed 228,000 people worldwide, meaning the current cuts could eliminate more than 6,800 roles. In a statement to CNBC, a company spokesperson estimated the reduction would affect approximately 6,000 employees. Either way, this will be the group’s largest round of redundancies since early 2023,when Microsoft cut 10,000 jobs.
Microsoft Aiming to Cut Management Layers
The scope of the newly announced layoffs is all-encompassing, with Microsoft confirming it intends to find redundancies across all teams and levels, both domestically and abroad. Reducing unnecessary management layers is said to be one of the goals of the workforce reduction. Since the pandemic, Microsoft has adopted a relatively generous work-from-home policy compared to much of the tech sector, offering hybrid and fully remote options whenever possible. The company doubled down on this approach even as much of the industrybegan rolling back work-from-home benefitsfrom 2021 onward. As a result, some layers of management from its previous structure may now be redundant.
Microsoft is now on course to conduct at least two rounds of layoffs in 2025. 2024 was a much quieter year in comparison, lacking any company-wide workforce cutbacks. It did, however, seeMicrosoft lay off 1,900 employees across its gaming division. Many of the eliminated roles were characterized as redundancies stemming from the Activision Blizzard acquisition, a $68.7 billion deal that was closed in October 2023 and added 13,000 employees to the company’s payroll.
Looking at the first half of the 2020s, 2023 remains Microsoft’s busiest year for workforce reductions. After cutting 10,000 roles in January, the company went on to eliminate approximately 700 positions at LinkedIn and 276 Washington-based roles in May and July, respectively. LinkedIn then announced a second round of layoffs in mid-October, affecting 668 positions.
