US news website Axios.
This is the third round of layoffs at the Big Tech firm since July. Microsoft had fired
nearly 1% of its 180,000-strong workforce across offices and product divisions in July as part of a ‘realignment’.
“Today we had a small number of role eliminations. Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities regularly, and make structural adjustments accordingly,” Microsoft said in a statement.
After the July layoffs, the company
fired another 200 employees from one of its customer-focused R&D projects in August.
The recent spate of layoffs comes amid a tightening global environment, fears of a recession, as well as a tech winter that has made investors increasingly cautious about their bets.
According to the Axios report, Microsoft declined to say how many jobs had been cut, but the layoffs were under 1,000. Further, it said the pink slips were handed to employees across a variety of levels and teams around the world.
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Some of the laid-off staff took to Twitter and Blind, among other online forums, to reveal that their jobs had been cut.
ET had written in depth
about how fears of a recession were hitting Big Tech firms, with most of them either pausing hiring or showing the door to employees while paring budgets as revenue from advertising continues to dwindle.
According to data compiled by Crunchbase, over 32,000 workers in the US tech sector across Big Tech firms such as Microsoft and Meta had been laid off in mass job cuts till late July.
Ride-sharing platform Uber, streaming giant Netflix, as well as several cryptocurrency exchanges and lending platforms were also among companies that had cut jobs.
“We’ve included startups and publicly traded companies based in the US. We’ve also included companies based elsewhere with a sizable team in the United States, such as Klarna,” the Crunchbase report said.
