Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, including Copilot and Windows staff. Here's what the workforce changes could mean for enterprise IT teams.
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Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, including Copilot and Windows staff. Here's what the workforce changes could mean for enterprise IT teams.
The post Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Staff in Windows, Copilot appeared first on TechRepublic.
On Monday, Microsoft said it is offering voluntary buyouts to eligible employees in select parts of the company. CNBC reports that the buyouts will be offered to roughly 60,000 employees, or about a quarter of its global workforce. The company describes the offer as an opportunity for employees who may have already been considering career moves outside Microsoft. While Microsoft did not give a direct reason for the buyout package, it comes as the company has spent the last several years managing costs amid investment in AI infrastructure and data-center buildout.
Microsoft will extend the voluntary exit offer (VEO) to qualifying employees in the United States, India, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Microsoft employees at level 70 or below will be eligible for the buyout program. The company's employee rankings are internal, but according to the salary and career database Levels.fyi, levels 65–67 correspond to principal positions, and 68–70 are at the partner/distinguished level. According to Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, eligible organizations were selected "based on each business’s priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs."
The effort is the second time Microsoft has run a voluntary workforce reduction in 2026. In April, the company offered its first voluntary retirement package to 8,750 US employees. In July, the Xbox division laid off 3,200 employees, or about 20 percent of its entire gaming division. As reported by CNBC, about 30 percent of eligible employees accepted the retirement offer, lessening the impact of the planned layoffs, according to Coleman. While the offer in April went out to long-tenured employees who might be nearing the end of their career, the VEO expands the effort to a much larger potential pool.
© Drew Angerer | Getty Images
Microsoft is making a new buyout offer to a much broader group of employees, this time including some executives — signaling that it’s not done shrinking its workforce despite thousands of layoffs and retirements this year.
The Voluntary Exit Offer, announced Monday in a memo to employees, is open to about 60,000 people in participating teams in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and India, the company told GeekWire. That’s about a quarter of its workforce, which numbered 223,000 people at last count.
Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
“This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support,” wrote Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s chief people officer, in the memo to employees.
It also gives participating organizations within the company “another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs,” she added.
Microsoft’s count of 223,000 full-time employees as of June 30 was down from 228,000 a year earlier, according to its annual filings. That latest number came before its July layoffs.
However, Microsoft says the offer isn’t a sign that it needs fewer employees. Instead, a company spokesperson described it as one of several ways it’s adjusting to changing business needs.
The Voluntary Exit Offer includes financial support and career planning resources, according to the memo. It says eligible employees will receive the details by email.
The package is equivalent to Microsoft’s standard severance, according to the company, including base pay based on tenure and level, continued stock vesting, healthcare coverage for a fixed period and career transition services. It doesn’t include the extended healthcare that was a major draw of the retirement program. Employees have until the first week of December to decide.
The new offer does not come with any age or tenure requirement, and performance isn’t a factor, the company said. It goes up to level 70 on Microsoft’s internal scale, which includes general managers and some employees with vice president titles, but not corporate vice presidents.
That’s a big change from the voluntary retirement program that Microsoft offered this spring, which was the first in its history. That program was limited to U.S. employees at the senior director level (level 67) and below whose age plus years at the company reached a minimum threshold. The company described that as a one-time initiative.
Buyouts are still relatively rare among the largest tech companies, which have generally relied on layoffs, stricter performance reviews and return-to-office mandates to thin their ranks.
Like its peers, Microsoft is under pressure from Wall Street to hold down operating expenses as it pours tens of billions of dollars into data centers and AI infrastructure.
Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs in July, about 2% of its global workforce, including about 600 in Washington state, followed by hundreds more across the company in September. The company cut more than 15,000 jobs in 2025.
The company said the new offer is not a replacement for layoffs, which will remain part of the company’s approach depending on business conditions.
When Microsoft offered the retirement program this spring, about 30% of the roughly 8,750 eligible U.S. employees took the deal. Coleman told GeekWire in July that the results reduced the size of the layoffs Microsoft announced that month.
At the time, Coleman said Microsoft was studying how to make voluntary exits a more regular part of how it manages its workforce, possibly on an annual or ongoing basis.
Among the other changes this time, Microsoft is leaving it to business leaders to decide whether their groups participate, the company said. The company’s sales organization is not participating, nor are some engineering groups and corporate functions.
“There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee,” Coleman wrote in the memo, explaining that participation by different groups “varies based on each business’s priorities, customer commitments, and workforce needs.”
She said Microsoft will keep helping employees build new skills and, where it makes sense, move into other jobs inside the company. Microsoft said in July that it had redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles over the previous year.
Microsoft reports quarterly earnings Wednesday afternoon, which could include projections for the cost of the new buyout offer. The company disclosed a $900 million charge for the retirement program in its April earnings report.
Nearly 200,000 workers have been affected by tech layoffs in 2026. See which companies are cutting jobs and what it means for tech workers.
The post Tech Layoffs 2026: 196,000 Workers Affected as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft Cut Jobs appeared first on TechRepublic.
Nearly 200,000 workers have been affected by tech layoffs in 2026. See which companies are cutting jobs and what it means for tech workers.
The post Tech Layoffs 2026: 196,000 Workers Affected as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft Cut Jobs appeared first on TechRepublic.
Editor’s note: GeekWire has been examining the economic challenges facing Seattle and the lessons the region can learn from Cleveland’s industrial decline and ongoing comeback. This three-part series from GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald explores how Seattle can navigate its own economic transition, adapt to a changing technology landscape, and preserve the prosperity that generations of innovation have built.
As you think about Seattle’s next act, let me offer a catchphrase: Don’t be Cleveland.
Before anyone from Northeast Ohio takes me to task again, let me quickly clarify: Don’t be the Cleveland of the last half of the 20th century. Today’s Cleveland is a story Seattle should study.
I’m far from the only one worried about Seattle. City Hall, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, and the newly formed Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound are all sounding alarms about the region’s economic future.
An independent 127-page City of Seattle-commissioned economic assessment — Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy — takes issue with the Cleveland comparison I penned for GeekWire earlier this year. The report says claims that Seattle could become the “next Cleveland” are “likely hyperbolic,” while acknowledging that “Seattle has real economic challenges.”
Hyperbolic is far from the worst thing I’ve been called.
Despite a reluctance to fully embrace Cleveland as a cautionary tale, the city’s report provides more to agree with than disagree with. And kudos to the city for taking an honest look at the economy, including criticism of the mayor’s signature policies.
Over the past decade, Seattle delivered more broad-based prosperity than almost any U.S. region, according to the Seawall report. Wages rose across the income spectrum, with the biggest gains at the bottom. Even after adjusting for living costs, workers at the 25th percentile earned roughly 15% more than their counterparts in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.
That’s a remarkable record.
It also makes Seattle’s current economic anxiety harder to dismiss — and its prosperity worth protecting. If Seattle’s performance disappoints, where exactly would you rather be? Growth brings problems, especially when poorly managed. But the alternative is worse.
We saw the aftermath firsthand when we visited Cleveland earlier this year. Its story is a reminder that prosperity isn’t permanent — and rebuilding an economy after decades of decline is a lot harder than keeping one healthy.
Much like Seattle today, Cleveland 75 years ago was a very successful city riding decades of strong economic and population growth, and home to some of that era’s Big Tech giants. The Cleveland Browns even dominated the 1950s NFL.
But Cleveland’s prosperity unraveled quickly.
The world changed. The Rust Belt started to rust. Employers closed down.
Cleveland’s population dropped 59% from its 1950 peak to 2020 — from 914,808 to 372,624 residents.
It went from one of the nation’s richest cities to one of the poorest. Seahawks fans take note: the Browns have never been to the Super Bowl.
When we visited Cleveland earlier this year, we asked everyone from the mayor to real estate developers to arts leaders what they wish they’d done differently and sought their advice for Seattle.
We learned a lot from a city hungry, united and focused on building prosperity for its residents.
Seattle rode the software boom to remarkable prosperity. Can it do the same in the AI era?
The warning signs are hard to ignore.
Amazon and Microsoft have cut more than 10,000 jobs across the Seattle metro area since 2023. Downtown office vacancy remains among the highest in the country. And the center of gravity for the AI boom is in the Bay Area, raising questions about Seattle’s ability to capture the next wave of growth.
The city’s economic report puts the challenge bluntly: “The version of the tech sector that drove the last wave of economic growth will not drive the next one.”
The report warns that Seattle’s next generation of startups may not be ready to replace the growth engines of the past. The risk isn’t just layoffs or empty office towers. It’s the company never founded, the midsize business squeezed by rising costs, or the engineer who leaves to build a startup somewhere else.
So how does Seattle prepare for its next economic chapter?
At its simplest, a city’s job is to attract people — and give them reasons to stay.
Population isn’t a perfect measure of prosperity, but it’s a useful proxy for a city’s appeal. People come for opportunity. They stay when the opportunities and quality of life are worth it. Growth brings challenges, but those are preferable to the alternative.
As Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told us, “I envy problems around growth.”
Seattle’s population has grown nearly 40% since 2000.
But that growth is slowing as our economic engine sputters.
The Boeing Bust of the 1970s, when Seattle’s population fell 7% and unemployment hit 17%, is a reminder that what goes up can come down.
Today, cities compete globally for talent, entrepreneurs and employers. That competition will only intensify as populations age and immigration restrictions tighten.
The most talented workers and entrepreneurs can go where they see the greatest opportunity — and where they feel wanted.
Consider what Seattle’s last century might have looked like without three people: Bill Boeing, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Boeing helped turn Seattle into an aerospace powerhouse. Gates chose to move Microsoft from Albuquerque to the Seattle area to usher in the software boom. Bezos and his then-wife, MacKenzie, famously drove their Chevy Blazer from Texas to Seattle to start Amazon.
Each helped shape the region’s economic future. We can’t predict who the next generation of business builders will be. But does Seattle have the same pull today? Or are the people we need choosing Austin, Miami, San Francisco or somewhere else?
Attracting newcomers matters. So does keeping the people who are already here. Do the economic opportunities still justify the cost of living? Is Seattle still a place where people want to live, work and play?
Residents have plenty of reasons to question the deal: public safety, housing costs, homelessness, schools, government services and taxes. Do the positives still outweigh the negatives?
Decades of growth brought extraordinary people and companies to Seattle. Our best chance of building the next era of prosperity is to keep them here — and give them room to build what comes next.
Yet we risk losing people and businesses we can’t easily replace: talented workers, entrepreneurs, executives, inventors, technologists, engineering teams and global headquarters.
As Seattle’s mayor waves goodbye to departing business leaders, the city’s own Seawall report offers a blunt warning: “Headquarters and top-tier tech jobs are very hard to replace.”
The report makes the broader case for growth, too. Losing tech jobs and companies won’t make Seattle more equitable, it warns. “If they leave, Seattle won’t become more equal, it will just become poorer.”
There’s a practical reason for that. Seattle’s fiscal model depends on a growing economy.
More residents and businesses generate property and sales tax revenue without requiring higher tax rates on those already here. As the report puts it, “it is easier to distribute the benefits of a growing pie than a fixed one.”
That’s another way of saying that when government spending outpaces population growth, a stagnant economy leaves fewer options for paying the bills — a challenge we’ll revisit in the next post.
Thanks to Cleveland for reminding us prosperity is fragile, decline is real, and recovery can take generations.
Seattle’s next era of prosperity is ours to build — or squander.
In the next post, we’ll look at what Seattle needs to do to get the fundamentals right to ensure the city is a great place to live, work and play.
Carbon Robotics, the Seattle-based agricultural technology startup known for its AI-powered, laser-weeding farm implements, has trimmed its workforce.
The company did not disclose the total number of layoffs, but confirmed to GeekWire on Monday that the cuts affected employees across multiple departments both in the U.S. and internationally.
Carbon Robotics currently employs 275 people worldwide, according to Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing, who attributed the decision to a need to “realign costs due to broader economic conditions.”
The cuts come after a period of rapid momentum for the startup. The company raised $20 million last year to support the development of an undisclosed AI-powered farm robot. Carbon also unveiled an autonomous tractor kit in 2025.
The company’s signature product is its LaserWeeder, a machine which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses AI to detect and map plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The most recent iteration is the LaserWeeder G2.
Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Paul Mikesell, Carbon Robotics has raised about $177 million to date from investors including BOND, NVentures, and Anthos Capital.
In a recent interview with AgFunder, Mikesell noted that the startup crossed the $100 million revenue threshold, stating, “We intend to keep scaling from there — it’s our intention to get to the point that we’re an independently publicly traded company, so that would involve going through an IPO.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, earlier this year touted Carbon Robotics’ machines on an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” as a possible solution in cutting pesticide use.
Carbon Robotics was named Next Tech Titan at the 2026 GeekWire Awards earlier this year. The company is currently ranked No. 8 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 12–16.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Gets Bigger, Gadgets Get Smarter, and Security Risks Mount appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 12–16.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Gets Bigger, Gadgets Get Smarter, and Security Risks Mount appeared first on TechRepublic.
Amazon laid off hundreds of employees this week in its Stores business, which runs the company’s main e-commerce site — the latest in a series of smaller job cuts in recent months.
Customer service, selling partner support and retail engineering teams were among those hit, according to internal Slack posts viewed by Business Insider and Reuters. Both outlets reported that fewer than 1,000 employees were impacted, citing people familiar with the matter.
The cuts came during Prime Big Deal Days, which ran Tuesday and Wednesday. The fall shopping event is one of the key annual milestones for Amazon’s retail team.
“We’re always looking at our team structures to ensure we’re best set up to move fast as we innovate for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement Wednesday night. “We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities.”
Amazon didn’t provide further details on the changes. The statement continued, “As part of these changes, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles, and we’re committed to supporting affected employees through their transition.”
The internal Slack posts suggested that affected employees were in the U.S., India and the UK, according to Business Insider. Amazon hasn’t yet filed a notice with Washington’s Employment Security Department, which is required when a company lays off 50 or more workers in the state.
Amazon’s online store sales rose 15% to $70.4 billion in the second quarter, and revenue from third-party seller services grew 16% to $46.8 billion. Together, they accounted for 58% of the company’s $200.6 billion in total revenue for the quarter.
The cuts follow Amazon’s elimination of about 30,000 corporate jobs in October 2025 and January 2026, the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history. Amazon has made smaller cuts since then, including in its robotics and artificial general intelligence groups.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, addressed the earlier cuts in a Fox News interview that aired Wednesday. Bezos has predicted that AI will make the economy so productive that many people won’t need to work as much, making it hard for companies to hire.
Asked by Bret Baier how Amazon’s 30,000 job cuts fit with that view, he said the company was “in a very special position” after hiring so many people during the pandemic. “The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our headcount,” he said.
Seattle’s tax collections have nearly tripled over the past decade, soaring from $900 million in 2013 to a projected $2.8 billion in 2026. But who pays those taxes, and how the tax revenue is collected, looks vastly different today than a decade ago.
A new report released by ECOnorthwest, commissioned jointly by the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, show city tax revenues far outstripping population and job growth, driven by targeted corporate taxes on a small pool of major employers.
Between 2013 and 2025, Seattle’s tax revenues jumped 172%, outpacing population growth (31%), job growth (23%), and local inflation (50%). During that period, real tax growth grew 5.6 times faster than population and 7.5 times faster than employment.
The findings come as city leaders, major tech employers and regional business groups grapple with shifting post-pandemic work patterns and a political climate that has frequently placed large technology companies like Amazon in its sights.
According to the report, broad-based core taxes, such as property, sales, utility, and general Business & Occupation (B&O) taxes, comprised 83% of city tax collections in 2013. By 2026, those core broad taxes are projected to drop to just 52% of the total revenue.
Replacing them are narrow, targeted tax levies:
Combined, two taxes that did not exist five years ago now account for nearly a third of all business tax dollars collected by the city. Overlap among top taxpayers means fewer than 20 companies account for roughly $356 million in annual City of Seattle revenue.
“Seattle’s tax collections are growing far faster than its population, jobs or inflation. Employers are carrying more of that burden. That trajectory is not sustainable,” said Seattle Metro Chamber president & CEO Joe Nguyen. “The question cannot always be how to collect more money. It must be how to deliver better results with the money we already have and build a tax structure that helps our economy grow.”
The heavy pivot to business revenue coincides with divergent employment trends between Seattle and its neighboring Eastside hubs.
Between March 2020 and March 2025, Seattle lost approximately 24,000 jobs, while the remainder of King County added 21,000. The report notes that Seattle lost 18,000 jobs in the single year leading up to March 2025 alone. And that figure that does not yet capture the full impact of major remote work policies and tech layoffs announced across the region.
The report arrives on the heels of previous GeekWire coverage tracking regional tech dynamics, including the shift of high tech jobs from Seattle to Bellevue, as well as broader political shifts in how West Coast hubs are responding to tech sector backlash and the AI boom.
However, in a sign that Mayor Katie Wilson is paying close attention to tech-sector headwinds and shifting job patterns, she proposed a $9.1 billion 2027 budget that would erase a $175 million general fund deficit and cut nearly $50 million in spending while freezing JumpStart tax rates.
Microsoft cut 277 jobs in the Seattle region as part of its latest round of layoffs, with artists, game designers and producers making up a large share of the affected roles, a new filing shows.
The filing was made public Thursday afternoon under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. Microsoft gave approximate numbers earlier this week when it announced the cuts, which included the latest stage in the company’s ongoing Xbox restructuring.
Art, game production, game design, technical art and audio design account for 77 of the 277 positions listed in the filing. Software engineering is the largest single category, totaling 60 roles.
Other positions are in functional areas including product marketing, technical writing, product management, data science, business management, finance and legal.
The filing says 252 of the positions impacted in the state are based at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, with 25 held by remote employees in the region, adding up to the 277 total. Microsoft had previously said about 300 of the cuts were in Washington state, out of fewer than 600 globally.
Out of that global total, 268 were in Xbox Game Studios, part of a restructuring designed to return the games division to growth and profitability. Halo Studios in Redmond faced a substantial reduction, and the company said work on the next Halo game is moving to its Activision subsidiary.
Microsoft cut 605 Washington jobs in July as part of 4,800 layoffs worldwide at the time. The company eliminated more than 15,000 positions globally across two rounds in 2025.
Seattle-based travel giant Expedia Group plans to lay off 58 Washington state-based employees according to a filing sent to state officials on Tuesday.
The cuts, detailed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) letter to the Employment Security Department, are expected to take effect between Nov. 21 and Dec. 1 at the company’s waterfront campus in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood.
Impacted positions span across technology, product, and corporate roles — including data scientists, software engineers, finance managers, and senior leadership.
GeekWire reached out to Expedia for comment on the reason behind the layoffs and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
The latest job eliminations follow a broader internal shakeup at Expedia, where top executives recently cited advances in artificial intelligence for allowing the company to streamline operations and restructure its product and technology teams.
Last month, Expedia parted ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents in a major product and technology reorganization. In an internal memo, company leaders noted that AI has “radically changed what’s possible,” allowing the travel giant to shift toward smaller, faster teams.
The upcoming job cuts also build on reductions from earlier in 2026. In January, Expedia eliminated positions across its engineering, product, and design divisions, which resulted in 162 Washington state employees being laid off.
The company ended 2025 with about 16,000 employees across nearly 50 countries, according to its most recent annual report, and said “approximately one half of our people work in technology roles.”
Employment peaked above 25,000 in 2019, fell to 14,800 during the pandemic, and rebounded to 17,100 by the end of 2023, before a series of restructurings and layoffs in recent years.
The cuts at Expedia reflect a broader, ongoing trend across Washington’s tech sector, where major employers continue to execute targeted restructurings rather than massive single-day layoffs. Over the past several months, workers have seen similar incremental reductions at Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, T-Mobile, Uber, Google, Starbucks, Qualtrics, Salesforce and elsewhere.
Microsoft is making hundreds of additional layoffs on Tuesday morning, continuing the Xbox restructuring announced in July but also extending beyond it with job cuts in areas including cloud, AI, marketing and research.
The company said the total reductions number fewer than 600 globally. About 300 of them are in Washington state, according to the company. It continues the steady trickle of job cuts by Microsoft and other tech companies in the Seattle region in recent months.
[Update: A filing made public Thursday put the official total in the state at 277 jobs.]
Worldwide, the company is cutting 268 roles in Xbox Game Studios, including Halo Studios, other first-party studios and the division’s management and operating teams.
It’s the continuation of a larger effort by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to cut costs and consolidate game studios under fewer publishers in an effort to return to growth and profitability.
Microsoft said in July that Xbox would shed about 3,200 roles by the end of its fiscal year, roughly 20% of the division, in what Sharma called the biggest restructuring in Xbox history. The latest Xbox cuts are part of those previously announced numbers.
The company said Tuesday that the Xbox restructuring is now about 75% complete.
“The goal is to strengthen our franchises and games by operating fewer business units, aligning groups that already work closely together, and focusing our publishing expertise,” Matt Booty, Xbox chief content officer, wrote in a memo to employees Tuesday morning.
Work on the next Halo game is moving to Activision, which Microsoft acquired in 2023 for $68.7 billion. The game will be led by a new team separate from the Call of Duty franchise.
A reduced team will stay at Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) in Redmond to support existing Halo games, the community and esports.
Rob Kostich, president of Activision, said in a statement that the company has “already begun assembling a purpose-built team, unique in capability and talent.” He said the goal is to “make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place.”
Activision is also taking over World’s Edge, the Redmond studio behind Age of Empires, and assuming control of Rare, the English studio behind Sea of Thieves.
Ninja Theory is facing a possible shutdown. Microsoft said in July it had a deal to hand off the studio, which makes the Hellblade series. That agreement fell through, as did a second one. Microsoft is telling employees that the studio could close, but it still hopes to hand it off.
Obsidian Entertainment will become part of Bethesda. The California studio made Fallout: New Vegas for Bethesda in 2010 as an outside developer, and it’s working on another game set in the Fallout universe now. Obsidian’s Grounded survival franchise will move over as well.
Microsoft Casual Games is moving under King, the maker of Candy Crush. The Redmond team makes Microsoft Solitaire and other titles bundled with Windows.
Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games will merge into a single studio, making both the Forza racing games and the Fable series. Turn 10 is in Redmond and Playground is in England. The two have worked together on Forza for a decade.
Undead Labs has been spun off. Microsoft said the Seattle studio behind State of Decay transitioned on terms similar to Compulsion Games and Double Fine, which went independent in August, and that State of Decay 3 will launch on Game Pass on day one with a new publisher.
Arkane in France still has no announced outcome. It’s the last of five studios Microsoft moved to divest in July. Consultations there are expected to run through the end of the year.
More details on Microsoft’s Washington state cuts, including the types of roles affected, will likely emerge later through a WARN notice filed with state employment officials.
The company described the reductions beyond Xbox as part of the normal course of business, as teams reevaluated their needs, with no single cause behind the layoffs. Microsoft and other big tech companies have been keeping a tight rein on operating expenses as they plow tens of billions of dollars into new AI and cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft eliminated 4,800 jobs globally in July, about 2% of its workforce, including 605 in Washington state. In 2025 it cut more than 15,000 across two rounds, about 6,000 in May and around 9,000 in July, including 830 in Washington.
The company also offered voluntary retirement for the first time this year. About 30% of roughly 8,750 eligible U.S. employees took the buyout, which reduced the size of the July layoffs.
At the same time, Microsoft continues to hire in other areas. The company said 850 university hires started in August and that it had 1,300 interns over the summer, many of whom it works to convert into full-time roles.
Microsoft’s latest cuts are part of a larger pattern across the industry and the region. Oracle eliminated 359 jobs in Washington last week, and Zillow cut more than 500 in August, its largest round of the year. Amazon, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Google, Salesforce, TikTok, Uber and Qualtrics have all made smaller cuts in the region since July.
Oracle is laying off 359 employees in Washington state — its second significant job cuts this year — according to a filing Wednesday with the state Employment Security Department.
The cuts affect remote employees across Washington state as well as on-site staff at Oracle’s downtown Seattle facilities, located in the Russell Investments Center on 2nd Avenue and at 2025 5th Ave.
Oracle noted in its Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, signed by HR Senior VP Anje Dodson, that its “Seattle sites are not closing.” Impacted employees received notice Monday and their last day will be Nov. 13.
The cuts heavily impact technical engineering and management roles across the enterprise software giant. According to the filing, affected titles include dozens of software developers, core infrastructure and platform software engineers, program managers, and site reliability engineers. Senior leadership was also affected by the reduction, with notices sent to multiple vice presidents, directors of engineering and product management, and principal data scientists.
The cuts are part of broader nationwide layoffs at Oracle. Business Insider reported this week that the tech giant is trimming payroll and raising capital as it racks up tens of billions of dollars in debt to fund massive AI data center infrastructure investments.
Internal emails sent to affected employees cited a “broader organizational change,” coming on the heels of a regulatory filing where Oracle explicitly noted that the deployment of AI technologies across its operations has resulted in workforce reductions. Oracle’s global headcount fell by roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, over the past fiscal year.
The new round of layoffs comes just six months after Oracle eliminated 491 jobs in Washington state in March. That reduction similarly targeted engineering talent — sweeping up more than 230 software developers alongside senior directors and vice presidents — as part of an initial wave of cuts tied to the company’s shift toward AI-led software development.
Combined, the two workforce reductions have slashed 850 Oracle positions in the state this year.
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