Microsoft is set to announce job today that is bound to affect up to 10,000 employees worldwide. The software giant is said to be looking at cutting around 5 percent of its workforce out of its more than 220,000 employees.
The job cuts are expected to affect its engineering division, the previous job cuts affected positions in consulting and customer and partner solutions.
Microsoft is the latest big tech company to face a challenging economy, and the job cuts will come just days after Microsoft implemented a new unlimited time off policy. Microsoft employees that have an unused vacation balance will get a one-time payout in April, and managers will be able to approve unlimited “Discretionary Time Off.”
The cuts also come just weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned of two years of challenges ahead for the tech industry. In an interview with a broadcaster, Nadella admitted Microsoft wasn’t “immune to the global changes” and spoke of the need for tech companies to be efficient.
“The next two years are probably going to be the most challenging,” said Nadella. “We did have a lot of acceleration during the pandemic, and there’s some amount of normalization of that demand. And on top of it, there is a real recession in some parts of the world.”