Layoffs

Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Employees

co-produced by AI27. October 2026, 06:29

Microsoft is offering voluntary exit packages to about 60,000 employees. © BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Anyone who wants to leave can go, and take money with them: Microsoft is offering a voluntary exit package to about 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its roughly 223,000-strong global work force. Amy Coleman, the company’s chief people officer, announced the new program, called the Voluntary Exit Offer, to staff on Monday and later published the memo on the official Microsoft blog. Microsoft confirmed the figure of 60,000 eligible employees to TechCrunch; Business Insider first reported the plan.

Who Gets the Offer

The key details of the program:

Countries: The offer applies to employees in the U.S., Canada, Britain and India.
Seniority: Staff up to level 70, meaning up to vice president, are eligible.
Divisions: Only selected teams are taking part. According to Bloomberg, they include Xbox, Windows, Copilot and finance. Parts of sales and marketing as well as data center staff are among those excluded.
Terms: The package is expected to be similar to Microsoft’s standard severance and, according to Ms. Coleman, includes financial support and career planning resources.
Deadline: Employees who accept must decide by early December and will leave the company at the end of the year.

Ms. Coleman presents the program as a new choice. Employees who may be considering a future outside the company can make that transition now with support, she wrote, while participating organizations get another way to adapt their work force to changing needs. “The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it,” she added.

The Third Round of Cuts This Year

The approach is not entirely new. In the spring, Microsoft offered a voluntary retirement program to long-serving U.S. employees for the first time in its history. More than 30 percent of those eligible accepted, Ms. Coleman said in the summer. In July, Microsoft then took the conventional route and cut about 4,800 jobs, mainly in its Xbox division and commercial sales. The year before, the company had already eliminated about 15,000 positions in two waves.

At the time, Ms. Coleman stressed that the eliminated roles were not being replaced by A.I. She added, however, that A.I. is changing how work gets done and that some tasks can now be automated. She also signaled that more changes were coming and that other parts of the business would need to make similar moves.

A.I. Spending Weighs on Costs

The backdrop is mostly financial. Microsoft is pouring enormous sums into data centers and chips for the A.I. boom and expects capital spending of about $175 billion (roughly €156 billion) in calendar 2026. Voluntary departures let the company cut personnel costs without announcing a large round of layoffs, with the headlines and unrest among staff that come with it.

The timing is notable: Microsoft reports results for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year after the market closes on Wednesday. Investors are likely to focus on how the record A.I. investments and the savings on staff show up in the numbers.

Rivals Are Cutting Too

Microsoft is not alone in reshaping its work force. Oracle began cutting thousands of jobs in the spring to offset the pressure of its A.I. investments. Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs last year as A.I. agents took over that work. In Europe, Deutsche Telekom aims to save about €2.5 billion with A.I. by 2030. Voluntary buyouts on this scale, however, remain rare in the tech industry.