“[W]e will align our cost structure with our revenue and where we see customer demand. Today, we are making changes that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce by 10.000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3. This represents less than 5 percent of our total employee base, with some notifications happening today,” Nadella said in a memorandum to Microsoft employees filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
At the same time, Microsoft will continue to hire and invest in “strategic areas” to provide for its long-term competitiveness, the memorandum said.
Microsoft will spend $1.2 billion in the second quarter of the year to cover costs associated with severance pay, hardware upgrade and the lease consolidation, the memorandum added.
The tech giant will become another major tech corporation in the United States that resorted to staff reductions over the last 12 months amid the global economic slowdown. Other companies that have implemented significant workforce reductions or plan to do so soon include Twitter, Amazon and HP among others.