Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 staff, India employees among those eligible
Microsoft has offered voluntary exit packages to roughly a quarter of its workforce in the US, Canada, India and the UK, with decisions due in December.
Microsoft has offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees, about a quarter of its global workforce, and employees in India are among those eligible. The company announced what it calls a Voluntary Exit Offer in a note to staff from chief people officer Amy Coleman on Monday, 26 October (US time), and confirmed the figure to TechCrunch. Eligible employees were to receive an email with details of their individual offer the same day.
The offer covers select teams in four countries: the United States, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. Microsoft had about 223,000 employees at the end of June, so the eligible pool works out to around 27% of its headcount, Fortune reported. The company has not said how many of the eligible staff are based in India, where it runs large engineering and research centres in Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
Who is eligible
According to TechCrunch and KUOW, the offer is open to employees at vice-president level and below, with the heads of each organisation deciding which teams take part. Bloomberg, as cited by TechCrunch, reported that Xbox, Windows, Copilot and finance are participating, while Forbes, citing a Reuters source, also listed human resources. Sales, marketing, security, data-centre staff and some engineering groups are reported to be excluded, though the outlets differ slightly on the exact list.
The terms are broadly in line with Microsoft’s standard severance and vary by country according to local labour law. Fortune reported that in the US the package includes at least eight weeks’ pay, scaled up by tenure, along with continued stock vesting, health cover and career-transition support. Employees are expected to make their decision in December, and those who accept would leave on 31 December, according to Fortune and Forbes. Coleman’s note described the scheme as new for the company and said Microsoft would learn from it.
Buyouts, not layoffs, for now
The move is a voluntary programme rather than a layoff announcement, and no compulsory job cuts were announced on 26 October. It does, however, follow several rounds of reductions. Microsoft cut more than 15,000 jobs in 2025 and about 4,800 more in July this year, with much of the recent pain concentrated in the Xbox gaming business, Fortune reported. Earlier in 2026 it ran a voluntary early-retirement scheme for long-serving US staff; about 8,750 people were eligible and roughly 30% took it.
Uptake this time is expected to be lower. A company spokesperson pointed reporters to similar programmes at other technology firms, which drew acceptance of 3–5%, Fortune said, while KUOW reported that Microsoft expects fewer takers partly because the earlier retirement package was more generous. Forbes calculated that if acceptance matched the earlier 30% rate, about 18,000 people would leave, which would equal the cuts that followed Microsoft’s 2014 purchase of Nokia’s phone business.
Cost cuts alongside heavy AI spending
The buyouts come as Microsoft pours money into data centres and AI hardware. Its capital expenditure was about USD 41 billion in the April–June quarter, according to Fortune. A spokesperson told KUOW that AI was not the driver of the buyouts, although several outlets framed the programme as part of a wider effort to reshape the workforce for the AI era. Other large technology firms, including Google, Amazon, Oracle and Meta, have also offered buyouts or cut jobs this year.
The offer also lands amid senior leadership changes. Fortune reported that LinkedIn chief executive Ryan Roslansky and chief communications officer Frank X Shaw are leaving, after gaming head Phil Spencer and executive Rajesh Jha retired earlier this year.
What happens next
Microsoft reports its July–September quarter results on Wednesday, 28 October (US time), when analysts are likely to press for detail on costs and headcount. For Indian employees, the key open questions are how many people at the India development centres have received offers and how local severance rules will shape the packages. Microsoft has not published country-level figures.
Sources
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