Microsoft has announced another round of layoffs this week, according to a report by Geekwire. The tech giant’s layoffs are part of its ongoing efforts to streamline its workforce.
Several LinkedIn posts surfaced showing that employees in product and programme management roles were among those impacted by the job cuts, according to the report.
The cuts impacted multiple teams across various geographical locations. However, the company declined to provide details about the number of employees that it has laid off.
“Organisational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Geekwire. “We will continue to prioritise and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners.”
In January, Microsoft laid off 2,000 employees in its gaming unit, months after it acquired Activision Blizzard, the company’s largest acquisition worth $69 billion.
These layoffs have come shortly after the conclusion of Microsoft’s fiscal year 2024, which ended on June 30. It is common for the company to implement restructuring parts of its business when it transitions into a new fiscal year.
In June this year, Microsoft cut around 1,000 jobs in areas including the Azure cloud unit and the HoloLens mixed reality organisation.
Microsoft’s employee count rose during the COVID-19 pandemic but has stabilised since. The company had employed around 2,27,000 employees worldwide by the end of 2023, down from 2,32,000 the previous year, according to Greekwire.
The recent layoffs come as Microsoft tries to maintain its profit margins and increase capital expenditure to provide the cloud infrastructure needed to train and deploy the models that power AI applications.
Microsoft is not the only tech company that has cut jobs. Other tech companies, such as Ola Electric, Simpl, Google, and Meta, have also cut jobs recently.
The tech industry has witnessed a wave of job cuts, with more than 98,000 employees laid off from over 330 companies globally in the first half of 2024, according to Layoffs.fyi, a platform tracking tech layoffs. More than 98,834 employees have been affected due to job cuts, reported Layoffs.fyi.