Microsoft Conducts 3rd Round of Layoff

San Francisco: Microsoft has conducted a third round of layoffs. This has impacted employees in roles related to supply chain, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The third wave of layoffs is part of the 10,000 job cuts announced by Microsoft earlier this year. The job cuts were across various levels, functions, teams and geographies.

Software giant Microsoft is expected to lay off around 5 per cent of its employees by this week, reported The Verge. A Bloomberg report said that Microsoft may announce the firing of staff on Wednesday. At present Microsoft has over 220,000 employees. It means around 11,000 employees may lose their jobs.

Microsoft is yet to confirm reports about a potential mass layoff this week.

In October last year, Microsoft sacked around 1000 employees. As per the latest reports, the latest job cuts in Microsoft will be mostly in the engineering divisions.

This decision to fire employees comes after Microsoft announced an “unlimited time off policy” for its salaried employees in the US. Under this policy, US salaried workers of Microsoft won’t have a fixed number of vacation days and can take unlimited leaves.

In the past, Microsoft had hinted about such drastic measures. Its CEO Satya Nadella, who recently visited India, had said that Microsoft is not immune to global changes.

Over the last five months, many American tech giants have fired thousands of employees. They blamed the Ukraine-Russia war, slow growth, and over-hiring during the peak COVID-19 pandemic, for it.