Microsoft has offered voluntary redundancy to up to 60,000 employees, including staff in the UK, as the technology group seeks to cut costs.
The buyout, which Microsoft calls a Voluntary Exit Offer, was announced to staff yesterday in a memo from Amy Coleman, its chief people officer. It is open to eligible employees in participating teams in the United States, Canada, India and the UK.
The eligible group represents about a quarter of Microsoft’s global workforce, CBS News reported. Microsoft employed about 223,000 people on a full-time basis at the end of June, 121,000 of them in the US and 102,000 internationally, according to its latest annual report. It employs about 6,000 people in Britain.
Staff working in finance, HR, AI, Microsoft Copilot and the Xbox gaming division are among those being offered the package. Workers in data centres, sales, marketing, cybersecurity and quantum computing will not be eligible.
Coleman said in the memo: “This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support.
“This is a time-limited, voluntary program that gives those who are eligible the opportunity to leave Microsoft with financial support and career planning resources.”
She added that the scheme gave participating divisions “another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs”.
Coleman wrote that some parts of the business were providing the offer and some were not, with participation depending on each unit’s priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs. Eligible employees were due to receive details of their offer by email within hours of the announcement.
The offer follows a voluntary retirement programme for long-serving staff earlier this year, which Coleman said the new scheme built on. More than 30 per cent of the 8,750 employees eligible for that programme accepted it.
Microsoft said it expected a lower acceptance rate for the new offer than for the retirement programme.
The company cut about 4,800 jobs in July, around 2 per cent of its workforce, including many in its Xbox business, according to CBS News. That followed several rounds of layoffs in recent years that removed tens of thousands of roles across the company.
The latest move comes as heavy capital investment in AI and data centre infrastructure weighs on budgets across the largest US technology companies.
Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, told analysts in July that the company expected to spend $175bn on AI infrastructure in 2026, CBS News reported.
Meta, one of the biggest spenders in the AI boom, has reduced its headcount by more than 20,000 from its peak in late 2022. In May it began cutting up to 8,000 roles, about a tenth of its global workforce.
Alphabet, the owner of Google, offered voluntary buyouts across several divisions last year. One of its executives reportedly told staff that anyone who was not “all in” on AI was eligible for a voluntary departure package.
Elon Musk told Twitter staff in 2022, shortly after buying the company, that they needed to commit to an “extremely hardcore” culture or accept severance.
In the UK, one in six employers expect AI to reduce their workforce within 12 months, according to a survey of more than 2,000 employers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development published in November 2025. Of those expecting job losses, 62 per cent said clerical, junior managerial, professional or administrative roles would be the first to go.
Microsoft is expected to report its quarterly results tomorrow.
