Microsoft is about to lay off thousands of employees across all of its divisions, a new report released today claims.
According to CNBC (which cites a statement given to it directly by Microsoft), 3% of all employees will be laid off “across all levels, teams, and geographies”. That’s CNBC’s wording.
As CNBC points out, Microsoft counted 228,000 employees on its books as of June last year. That would mean that roughly 6,800 employees will be losing their jobs in the largest round of company cuts since January 2023, when around 10,000 staff members were laid off.
In a statement as loaded with corpo-speak as you’d expect, a spokesperson told CNBC that the layoffs are part of “organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace”.
These cuts aren’t related to performance, according to Microsoft; instead, they’re about reducing “layers of management”, as CNBC puts it.
Despite Microsoft wanting to “best position” itself for “success”, it seems the company is already achieving that success. Back in April, the company celebrated a buoyant third quarter for the 2024-25 fiscal year, with revenue up 13% year-on-year and operating income up 16%.
Xbox’s “content and services revenue” was up 8% in that same period, so whatever Microsoft’s motivation is for laying off thousands of its employees, it can’t be to turn around struggling fortunes.
These layoffs come just a couple of weeks after EA announced sweeping cuts to its own workforce, with Titanfall and Apex Legends developer Respawn among the EA subsidiaries most affected by the layoffs. Other studios hit by cuts in recent months include BioWare and, er, Microsoft again.
Of course, the staggering number of employees the tech giant has laid off in recent times didn’t stop CEO Satya Nadella scoring himself an eye-wateringly high payrise in 2024. Twas ever thus, eh?
In gaming terms, Microsoft’s Xbox division is gearing up (no pun intended) to release Gears of War: Reloaded later this year, and upcoming major titles include Gears of War: E-Day and Fable, although neither has a release date as of yet.