Microsoft cuts nearly 900 Seattle-area workers

Near 900 Seattle-area workers of Microsoft might be laid off in March, in accordance with a discover posted Wednesday by the Washington state Employment Safety Division.

Driving the information: Among the many 10,000 company-wide layoffs introduced by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Wednesday, 878 will have an effect on staff primarily based in Redmond, Bellevue and Issaquah, in accordance with the Employee Adjustment and Retraining Notification.

• The layoffs, listed as everlasting, will go into impact on March 20.
• As of 2022, Microsoft reported it had 221,000 workers with 122,000 of them working within the U.S.
• It was not instantly clear what number of staff are employed at Microsoft’s Seattle-area campuses. The Seattle Instances reported the quantity was near 50,000; the Puget Sound Enterprise Journal Information reported 61,000 Microsoft workers statewide, whereas the state Employment Safety Division’s Labor Market division lists the variety of Microsoft workers in Washington at a bit over 40,000.
• Microsoft didn’t reply Wednesday to a request for data.

The massive image: The Redmond-based software program and cloud agency joins a rising record of tech giants which have just lately lower workers, together with Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, Twitter and Snap. This would be the third spherical of layoffs at Microsoft throughout the final yr.

Particulars: The present cuts, affecting lower than 5% of the corporate’s whole workforce, are essential to get prices in step with income and buyer demand, Nadella introduced in a weblog publish.

• Some workers are being notified of the layoffs this week.
• Bloomberg reported that the corporate plans to eradicate positions in quite a few engineering divisions. Fortune, in the meantime, reported cuts to the agency’s video-game divisions.
• Nadella mentioned the corporate plans to proceed hiring individuals in strategic areas, reminiscent of synthetic intelligence.

What they’re saying: “These are the sorts of onerous decisions we have now made all through our 47-year historical past to stay a consequential firm on this trade that’s unforgiving to anybody who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts,” Nadella mentioned.