Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 workers, more than a quarter of its staff
Microsoft confirmed on Monday that it is offering a new "Voluntary Exit Offer" to roughly 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its roughly 223,000-person global workforce. It is the broadest workforce move the company has floated this year, and it arrives six months after a much narrower buyout program that fell well short of thinning the company's ranks.
Eligible staff are at level 70 (vice president) and below, working in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or India on what Microsoft calls "participating" teams. Bloomberg's reporting, cited by multiple outlets, names Xbox, Windows, Copilot, and Finance among the groups included; data-center teams and some sales and marketing staff are excluded. Terms mirror Microsoft's standard severance package, and because the offer is entirely voluntary, the number of people who actually leave could land far short of 60,000.
A sequel to a program that didn't do much
Microsoft's first attempt at this, an April 2026 Voluntary Retirement Program, was far narrower: it targeted employees nearing retirement age, which left roughly 8,750 workers eligible. About 30% accepted, a few thousand departures against a workforce north of 220,000. That program's modest yield helps explain the scale of this one. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman's internal memo frames the new offer as giving employees who may be "considering a future outside the company" that option, but expanding eligibility nearly sevenfold suggests Microsoft wants a lot more people to actually take it.
There's a pattern worth watching here. Windows Central notes that the April buyout was followed, in July, by an actual round of layoffs — raising the question of whether this much larger voluntary offer is itself a precursor to mandatory cuts if too few employees self-select out. Buyouts are a cheaper, better-publicized way to shrink headcount than layoffs: lower severance costs, no WARN notices, less immediate press blowback. Microsoft's Xbox division has already absorbed thousands of job cuts this year separate from this offer, suggesting the company is comfortable reaching for multiple levers at once.
Trimming Copilot while building $175 billion in data centers
The detail that stands out most is that Copilot, the product that is supposed to be the public face of Microsoft's AI strategy, is among the teams eligible for the exit offer. At the same time, Microsoft has been pouring billions of dollars into AI data centers this year — Engadget's own reporting describes the sums as "billions and billions of dollars" of committed infrastructure spending. Capital is flowing into compute at a pace few companies can match, while the org chart around that compute — including the team building the AI product itself — is being offered a door out.
That juxtaposition is bigger than Microsoft. Across the industry this year, companies have treated model training and data-center buildout as the place to spend without limit, and software, support, and middle-management headcount as the place to find savings, even inside the AI product groups that are supposedly the growth story. A company doesn't open a buyout to more than a quarter of its global staff unless it expects, or wants, a meaningful fraction of them to walk through it — and asking tenured employees to self-select for departure lets Microsoft reshape its workforce without the formal layoff machinery that invites more scrutiny.
Microsoft hasn't said whether it will disclose how many employees ultimately accept, and because participation varies by team, the real headcount reduction could land anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands. What's clear is that six months after its first voluntary-exit experiment underwhelmed, Microsoft is making a far bigger bet that resignation-shaped downsizing can do what the April round couldn't, even as its AI capital spending keeps climbing.