Tech behemoth Microsoft announced Wednesday that it would lay off 10,000 employees as the industry sheds huge amounts of jobs after scaling up too quickly amid the pandemic.
The company said in a Securities and Exchange filing that the workforce reductions would happen by the end of the third fiscal quarter. Forty-six positions in Silicon Valley will be eliminated. Microsoft will also consolidate its office leases and create higher-density workspaces.
Some of the employees will be notified today that they are being let go. The filing said that the company will offer “above-market” severance, six months of health care and career transition services, among other benefits.
“First, as we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a letter to employees. “We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one.”
Nadella also noted the shift in the industry as advances in AI continue, and said that the company would invest strategically in growth areas where it sees customer demand.
Meanwhile, a video clip of Nadella shows him speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, discussing the tensions between leaders urging more productivity and workers who feel burned out.
Leaders are concerned about lack of productivity, but workers feel burned out: who is right?
— World Economic Forum (@wef) January 18, 2023
For @satyanadella, the answer to this question lies in data and careful analysis, not dogmatism. @Microsoft #wef23 pic.twitter.com/8aDYVLH5q5
Huge cuts have also begun today at Amazon, which announced imminent layoffs in November and earlier this month said it would lay off 18,000 employees.
The cuts at Microsoft and Amazon come on the heels of major reductions at companies ranging from Meta to Stripe and Salesforce.
The move ranks Microsoft as the third-largest tech company in terms of headcount reductions in the past year. (Click here to read the full list of the worst tech layoffs.)
Correction: The list in this article was updated to include data from original news reports in addition to Layoffs.fyi, which resulted in a revised ranking.