Microsoft likely to sack 11,000 employees worldwide

Tech giant Microsoft is set to sack 5% of its employees worldwide which works out to around 11,000 employees, according to Sky News.

The axe is expected to fall on staff in the human resources and engineering divisions of the company.

Microsoft appears to be following in the footsteps of other tech giants such as Amazon.com Inc and Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms in cutting down its workforce as demand has slowed and global economic outlook ahead has taken a turn for the worse.

The company had 221,000 full-time employees, including 122,000 in the United States and 99,000 internationally, as of June 30, according to stock exchange filings.

Microsoft is under pressure to maintain growth rates at its cloud unit Azure, after several quarters of the downturn in the personal computer market hurt Windows and devices sales, the Reuters report said.

It had said in July last year that a small number of roles had been eliminated. In October, news site Axios reported that Microsoft had laid off under 1,000 employees across several divisions.

The cuts also come just weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said “The next two years are probably going to be the most challenging. 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.”

Meta announced in November the loss of 11,000 jobs, or about 13 percent of its workforce. At the end of August, Snapchat sacked about 20 percent of its employees, around 1,200 people.

Twitter fired about half of the social media platform’s 7,500 employees after Elon Musk took over the company.