Last year, Microsoft cut jobs or stopped new hires in several rounds. Now the cuts will probably be more massive.
Now Microsoft also wants to cut jobs. According to Sky News, 5 percent of the workforce is at stake – that would be around 11,000 employees to be laid off. The British news site does not name any sources for the report but adds that the US group will probably announce the exact figures before January 24th and the presentation of the business figures. According to the Reuters news agency, the human resources department and the technology department will be affected. At least one analyst on the New York Stock Exchange is convinced that the number will be even higher. Microsoft itself has not commented on the report, saying that “rumors and speculation” are not addressed.
No improvement in sight for the IT sector
Overall, Microsoft had over 220,000 full-time employees last summer, but a few thousand jobs had already been cut in two rounds. In addition, Microsoft canceled job postings in the cloud and security areas and announced at the time that these savings would continue. Should the job cuts reported by Sky News now come, it would be significantly larger again. Overall, the group is under pressure to increase revenue from the cloud business after revenue from the device division fell.
If the reports come true, it would indicate that the situation in the tech industry is not improving and is likely to worsen, Reuters quoted an analyst as saying. The latest wave of layoffs in the sector has already been greater than any since the pandemic began. Over the past year, over 150,000 jobs were lost in the US IT industry, compared to around 15,000 in 2021 and around 80,000 between March and December 2020. The cuts last year were particularly large at Amazon with around 18,000 layoffs and at Facebook parent Meta with more than 11,000 layoffs. Microsoft would now line up there.
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