US tech giant, Microsoft, says it is laying off about 9,000 workers in a second mass layoff since 2023.
Microsoft began sending out lay off notices on Wednesday, hitting the company’s Xbox video game business and other divisions.
Among those losing their jobs are 830 workers tied to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, according to a notice sent to state officials Wednesday.
Microsoft said the lay off of workers will affect multiple teams around the world, including its sales division, describing it as “organisational changes” needed to succeed in a “dynamic marketplace.”
The company won’t say the total number of lay offs except that it was about 4% of the workforce it had a year ago.
A memo to gaming division employees Wednesday from Xbox CEO, Phil Spencer said the cuts would position the video game business “for enduring success and allow us to focus on strategic growth areas.”
On Microsoft’s lays off workers, Spencer said Xbox would “follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness.”
The company employed 228,000 full-time workers as of June 2024, the last time it reported its annual headcount. Its latest lay offs would cut fewer than 4% of that workforce, according to Microsoft. But it has already had at least three layoffs this year, and it’s unlikely that new hiring has matched the amount lost. Either way, a 4% cut would amount to somewhere in the range of 9,000 people.
Microsoft’s lay off of workers continues to invest huge amounts of money in the data centres, specialised computer chips and other infrastructure needed to advance its AI ambitions. The company anticipated that those expenses would cost it about $80 billion in the last fiscal year. Its new fiscal year began Tuesday.
Microsoft, in June, cut another 300 workers based out of its Redmond headquarters, on top of nearly 2,000 who lost their jobs in the Puget Sound region in May, most of them in software engineering and product management roles, according to information it sent to Washington state employment officials.
The company has repeatedly characterised its recent lay offs as part of a push to trim management layers, but the May focus on cutting software engineering jobs has fueled worries about how the company’s own AI code-writing products could reduce the number of people needed for programming work.
Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella said earlier this year that “maybe 20, 30% of the code” for some of Microsoft’s coding projects are probably all written by software.”
(AFP)
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