Posted on 10/27/2026 3:46:30 AM PDT by DFG
Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — as the software giant works to cut costs and revamp its staff for the AI era.
Employees in the US, Canada, the UK, and India on Monday received a memo saying the voluntary exit offers “are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”
Microsoft had about 223,000 employees at the time the memo went out.
Microsoft’s Xbox, Windows, Copilot and finance divisions are getting the offers, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news. Workers have until Dec. 31 to make a decision, a Microsoft spokesperson said, adding that US employees will get at least eight weeks’ pay if they take a buyout.
In the spring, Microsoft offered voluntary retirement to older employees who had worked at the company for an extended period. Last year, the company laid off 9,000 employees.
“My promise is to continue to provide clarity, listen and learn and keep improving,” Microsoft’s chief people officer Amy Coleman wrote in Monday’s missive.
The company has been going all in on AI infrastructure. This past summer, it reported an 18% revenue increase, with its cloud products responsible for a big chunk of the growth.
The company, which is behind Azure and Github, is also funneling cash to its data center network.
“The best thing that can happen to Microsoft is what’s happening right now,” Microsoft’s Jared Spataro said of the company’s AI efforts at a Citigroup conference in September.
The company reported $130 billion in new data center leases earlier this year, according to Bloomberg.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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The Banks started doing this 2 years ago. The job market in Banking is simply awful right now. I think AI is a bubble and they are eventually going to have to reverse course and rehire a lot of the people they let go to take back control and to fix the things AI screwed up. I’m willing to bet the same thing will happen in other industries. I just hope this bubble bursts and the jobs recession ends before people bleed out financially.
“Learn to code.”
Perfect, 60,000 new dich diggers and migrant labor available for our farms. Hire American!
Now we can deport the illegals even harder! See democrats we don’t need illegals for pick our lettuce.
So how many H-1B visas are they getting this year? Lay off Americans and hire foreignors , we’ve seen this before.
Maybe Dell will follow suit. There’s one guy I’d like to see leave. He’s the guy who thought it was a good idea to put a dedicated calculator key on my new laptop. The calculator key literally is 1/8” above an ACTUAL calculator called a ... KEYPAD.
Probably the same guy who replaced the Ctrl key with a Copilot key to the right of the space bar.
(I’m not frustrated at all.)
“Microsoft Azure, launched in 2010, marked a pivotal shift from on-premises datacenters to cloud computing. By offering businesses a global network of datacenters maintained and managed by Microsoft, Azure reduced the time and expense associated with maintaining on-premises infrastructure.”
“Azure, the Microsoft Cloud computing platform, offers more than 200 products and services across a global network of datacenters.
“With more than 400 highly secure datacenters in over 70 regions, Azure delivers the most extensive cloud footprint, giving businesses more regions to choose from than any other cloud provider.”
“Azure the trusted choice for 95% of Fortune 500 companies, supporting key applications like SAP, Databricks, VMware, SAP, and high-performance computing.”
“the Azure AI Foundry Model features more than 11,000 models. These include open and frontier models, the latest from OpenAI, large language models, and the Microsoft Phi family of small language models.”
“More than 60% of Azure customer cores run on Linux—and customers have the freedom to use any distribution.
“Azure also supports a vast array of popular technologies, including Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Apache, Cassandra, and MongoDB.”
“Here are a few featured Azure open-source collaborations of note: Azure OpenAI, GitHub, Canonical, Red Hat, Databricks, Hashicorp, Redis, and SUSE, as well as contributions to Python, Node.js, the Linux kernel, and Kubernetes.”
“A dedicated team of more than 10,000 security experts continuously monitors systems, detects vulnerabilities, and tracks breach patterns and bad actors.”
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-azure/
I’m old enough to remember when hiring third worlders was going to save software companies money. How did that work out?
If the government is still giving out h-1b passes I will be so done.
If there isn’t a kick up in deportations in all industries I will be so done.
So how H1B are headed home to India or be deported? Many have wives here, maybe children.
Let’s hope all 60k!
Probably all libtards... Learn to Code.
They could do the right thing and eliminate the visa workers they were publicly shamed for.
If you’re not paying attention a small AI team cloned the entire Adobe suite in a week well enough to get it into a public beta and open source. The driving force was Adobe’s cancellation fees.
All I could think of is Adobe is now Blockbuster and they just gave their Netflix a reason to exist.
Already happened in China! AI stocks crashed yesterday in China.
And why does this reliance on AI remind me of Ford and other auto makers announcing that they would concentrate on EV's just a few years ago???
AI has been on a downward trend in China for weeks now. The capitalization of the AI industry in U.S. is very different from that in China. If the U.S. AI bubble bursts, the world economy will go into recession and many people will lose their jobs in the resulting downturn.
Have you looked at PE ratios of AI stocks? By definition they are in a bubble. Every bubble has burst in history. Well. You know what they say about those who ignore history?
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