Fears of a recession and adverse macroeconomic conditions have, once again, persuaded even the biggest of tech companies, to terminate scores of employees as part of their cost-cutting measures. The latest company to do so is Microsoft, which, according to media reports, is on its way to reduce its workforce a second time, by nearly 5%.
The development was reported by Sky News, and later corroborated by Bloomberg. The layoffs, which will go on to impact around 11,000 employees, may be announced as early as today, and we may see Microsoft start firing its employees from this week. According to Bloomberg, the impacted employees will span across the company’s engineering divisions.
While media reports have highlighted this development, the company itself remained mum on whether it was getting ready to resort to the fresh round of mass layoffs. A Microsoft spokesperson told AFP that the company would not be commenting on what it referred to as “rumor.”
Microsoft currently has over 220,000 employees, including 6,000 in the UK itself. This development comes a week before Microsoft is due to report its earnings and financial performance during the winter quarter and the fag end of the previous year, as well as soon after the company implemented it’s new “unlimited time off policy.”
Under this, Microsoft employees that have an unused vacation balance will get a one-time payout in April, and managers will be able to approve unlimited “Discretionary Time Off.”
If Microsoft follows through and axes thousands – tens of thousands, to be precise – then it will mark the latest round of layoffs by the US-based tech behemoth. The current mass layoff, unsurprisingly, will be “significantly larger” than the 1% reduction in its workforce, which Microsoft had enacted last year. At that time, the company had fired employees across numerous positions in consulting and customer and partner solutions.
It remains to be seen whether Microsoft’s efforts to reduce its workforce amidst a slowing global economy bear any fruit. The economic downturn, tanking of tech stocks, and overall rough economic conditions have prompted multiple firms across the globe to freeze hiring, shut down divisions, and announce job cuts that went on to affect tens of thousands of employees.
Twitter, Meta, and Amazon are among those who resorted to mass layoffs over the past months – Meta fired 11,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce, Last November, while Amazon announced earlier this year that it intended to eliminate 18,000 jobs from its workforce owing to the “uncertain economy.” Twitter saw a mass exodus of employees (and executives) ever since Elon Musk took control of the micro-blogging site.
