Microsoft's restructuring remains incomplete; the tech behemoth announces layoff of 305 employees, mostly concentrated within Washington State. Just this past week under three weeks since a much larger cut that saw approximately 3% of its global workforce lose their jobs-or roughly 6,000 people.
The notification filings stated that the employees shall be notified on Monday. Not mentioning whether there are also employees from outside Washington State included in this lay-off, Microsoft confirms that this represents a very small fraction-much less than 1% -of their total global employee base.
A Microsoft spokesperson indicated that the cut-off jobs would still continue to be part of design changes in the organization to place itself in a better position for success in a dynamic market-space, which put a repetition of what it stated this May bout of lay offs.
At that time, Microsoft stated that they were looking to create more agile teams and change the manager to employee ratio. The company wanted to flatten the layers of managers, although data from the May layoffs suggested most individual contributors - especially software engineers and product managers-would be affected; less than 17% of those laid off were indicated to be managers. Microsoft also clarified that the May lay offs were not performance-based.
To put context into those numbers:
- The May Layoffs cut across a global population of around 6,000 employees.
- Within the cuts for the state of Washington, there were 1,985 individuals named in Washington state with a noted layoff date of July 12, 2025.
- The current round of layoffs amounts to 305 more in Washington (Redmond) with a noted date of August 1, 2025, of layoff commencement.
Thus, this brings the total reported layoffs in Microsoft's home state to almost 2,300 in the last few weeks.
Before these recent cuts, Microsoft had 228,000 employees worldwide last year, of which almost half were based at their Redmond campus.
Microsoft is not putting these layoffs directly to any improved efficiencies brought about by AI; they have mentioned this before, though more generally in talking about new technologies helping workers to be more productive. "Making staffing decisions to meet the needs of the business is a regular practice for us, and the intention at this time is to increase speed through flattening management layers and streamlining roles to minimize overlap," it noted.
This event is still continuing its course, and many onlookers will keep an eye out to monitor how these changes would carve the future affairs for Microsoft operations.
