Microsoft to ax 11,000 jobs under engineering, HR divisions this Wednesday - reports

Microsoft is cutting as many as 11,000 jobs within its workforce this Wednesday, according to UK broadcaster Sky News. According to additional media reports, the decision will primarily affect the company’s engineering and human resources divisions.

After the exciting news about the new unlimited time off policy for full-time US employees, which started last Monday, Microsoft is now axing 5% of its employee population. With 221,000 full-time employees, this translates to at least 11,000 layoffs.

There is no clarity on what specific divisions will be directly hit with the bad news, but Bloomberg reports that it will be announced to its engineering divisions, while Business Insider adds it will also affect the company’s recruiting workers.

This is not the first huge news about Microsoft laying off workers, especially in this era where many companies are struggling in the current economic state. Last year, the Redmond company also laid off 1% of its workers under its “Modern Life Experiences” division. That is much smaller than this upcoming layoff announcement, but it seems inevitable, especially with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicting a two-year-long challenge in the tech industry.

“The next two years are probably going to be the most challenging,” Nadella told CNBC in an interview. “We did have a lot of acceleration during the pandemic, and there’s some amount of normalization of that demand. And on top of it, there is a real recession in some parts of the world.”

While Microsoft is the latest titan in the tech industry to have its layoff, there are also other big companies that have already taken similar steps before. This includes Meta and Amazon, which both declared layoffs in 2022. Meanwhile, Apple and Google took a rather different path by temporarily having a hiring freeze.