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Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its global workforce, as the tech giant cuts costs while pouring money into artificial intelligence.
The company announced the offer on Monday, October 26. Staff at vice president level and below on select teams in the United States, Canada, India and Britain will be eligible, a Microsoft spokesperson said, while some groups — including some working on data centres, sales and marketing — are excluded. Microsoft had 223,000 employees globally at the end of June, down from 228,000 at the end of 2025, according to regulatory filings, making about 27 percent of the workforce eligible for the new offer.
Why Microsoft is doing this now
The buyout is a cost-cutting move designed to free up money for AI. Microsoft, like its biggest rivals, is spending heavily on data centres, chips and other infrastructure for AI products, and that spending has put pressure on operating costs even as the company's cloud and AI businesses grow. The company is expected to report quarterly earnings later this week, when investors will look for signs of how that spending is paying off.
"The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we're evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter," Amy Coleman, Microsoft's executive vice president and chief people officer, told employees in a memo.
Not a layoff — but the scale is striking
A voluntary offer is not the same as a layoff: employees choose whether to take the package, and Microsoft has not said how many it expects to accept, or what the terms are. But the scale is unusual. It is the second voluntary buyout Microsoft has offered this year: in April, the company reportedly offered around 7 percent of its U.S. workforce the option to retire early, and around 30 percent of those eligible took that deal, according to CNBC.
If uptake this time resembles April's, tens of thousands of employees could leave — a significant reshaping of one of the world's largest technology employers, and a signal of how aggressively the industry is rebalancing its workforce toward AI work.
Part of a wider tech retrenchment
Microsoft is not alone. As major tech companies spend heavily on AI, concerns are growing about what that spending means for jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is among industry leaders who have warned of mass job losses from AI. AFP also noted that Netflix will reportedly cut around 6 percent of its workforce, about 1,000 jobs, and that auction site eBay laid off 1,000 employees earlier this month, adding to 800 jobs cut earlier this year.
For Microsoft employees, the immediate question is personal: whether to take a package now or bet on a future inside a company that is openly redirecting its money and its headcount toward AI. For the wider industry, the offer is another data point in the same story — the AI boom is creating enormous investment, and it is also changing who does the work.
Sources: Agence France-Presse via Malay Mail, Free Malaysia Today and The Hindu (60,000 figure, eligibility, exclusions, Coleman memo quote, 223,000/228,000 headcount, April offer and CNBC uptake figure, earnings timing); News18 and Mathrubhumi (offer scope, four countries, second offer this year); WSNext (level-70-and-below detail). Netflix and eBay figures are as reported by AFP. Uptake for the new offer is not yet known; the April 30 percent figure is a separate, earlier programme.