Global economic downturn has continued to take a toll on industries, forcing tech companies to cut down workforce. Some big players in the American tech industry, such as Tesla, had earlier in the year announced plan to lay off employees. Now others are quietly doing it.
Insider reports citing affected employees, that Microsoft quietly laid off about 1,000 employees in teams across the company – making it one of the biggest layoffs that a tech company is conducting in recent times, and it underscores how much industries are anticipating recession.
The report said the cuts appears widespread across Microsoft: conversations with people close to the company and posts on social media sites like Blind and Twitter indicate that the cuts affected everything from the Xbox console gaming division to the cutting-edge Microsoft Strategic Missions and Technology organization. KC Lemson, a longtime Microsoft veteran and a product manager in the office of the Chief Technology Officer, tweeted on Monday night that she lost her job earlier in the day.
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“Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities on a regular basis, and make structural adjustments accordingly,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “We will continue to invest in our business and hire in key growth areas in the year ahead.”
Microsoft in July said it planned to lay off less than 1% of its 180,000-person workforce and significantly slowed hiring as the risk of a recession looms. It’s unclear whether this week’s layoffs are included in the previous figure, but one person who told Insider they have been laid off said they were first hired about a month ago.
Zach Kramer, who runs Microsoft’s Mission Engineering team, in an email viewed by Insider notified employees that the group would be “deprioritizing work already underway.”
“This is hard to do,” Kramer said in an email viewed by Insider. “There are lots of ideas that could potentially have an impact and each of us has worked very hard, but we must make tradeoffs as resources are not unlimited and time is the scarcest of them all.”
Kramer’s email did not explicitly mention layoffs, but said leaders will work with those who are “part of a prioritization change” in order to “wrap up existing work and determine next steps.” Teams on the chopping block appear to include Studio Alpha, which Microsoft once referred to as its “serious gaming initiative” for war-gaming simulations, and the Mission Expansion cloud government team, according to one insider.
This move by Microsoft follows the trend set earlier by others. Earlier this month, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, reportedly began a quiet layoff targeting about 12,000 employees. The social media conglomerate is one of the hardest hit by economic misfortune and the growing global inflation that has impacted advertising. More companies are expected to cut workforce in coming months.
