Microsoft is laying off thousands of employees this week – update

Tech giant Microsoft is announcing a major round of layoffs this week. Sources report this to British news medium Sky News. Thousands of employees would lose their jobs. The company already held several smaller rounds of layoffs last year.

Microsoft would announce the round of layoffs ‘within days’, writes Sky News. The company would consider cutting 5 percent of its workforce. Microsoft employs 220,000 people, which would bring the round of layoffs to around 11,000 jobs, although Sky News could not confirm the concrete number.

Bloomberg also writes about layoffs at Microsoft, including in its engineering divisions. According to that news agency, the layoffs will be announced on Wednesday. According to Bloomberg, this is a round of layoffs that is considerably larger than the rounds of layoffs that Microsoft held last year. Then less than 1 percent of Microsoft’s workforce was cut. In October, the company laid off “fewer than 1,000” people and 1,800 were laid off in July.

Microsoft is not the only tech giant to announce a major round of layoffs due to a declining economy. At the end of last year, Meta also laid off 11,000 employees and at the beginning of this year Amazon announced that it would cut 18,000 jobs. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said in an interview that the tech sector is facing “tough two years.”

Update, 3:54 p.m.: Microsoft confirms the round of layoffs. That writes, among others, the Reuters news agency. The company plans to cut 10,000 jobs before the end of its third quarter in fiscal year 2023, which ends March 31.