Less than 4 per cent of the company’s total workforce would be affected, a representative said. The cuts would have an impact across teams, geographies and tenure and were made in an effort to streamline processes and reduce layers of management, the person added.
“We continue to implement organisational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace,” the representative said.
Bloomberg previously reported that Microsoft was planning to slash thousands of jobs in July, which would target salespeople and also affect divisions including Xbox. The terminations follow an earlier round of lay-offs in May that hit 6,000 people and fell hardest on product and engineering positions.
Across the tech industry, companies are grappling with the spiralling costs of staying up to date in the AI race, whether by training the large language models that underpin the technology, building servers and data centres, or developing AI applications.
After spending tens of billions of dollars on data centres and application development, Microsoft has pledged to Wall Street that it would put a lid on costs.