Microsoft is continuing to follow through with the 2,850 additional job cuts company officials announced back in July that they’d be making during fiscal 2017. The latest round of cuts, which happened this past week, affected Redmond and London (as well as some other geographies).
The Financial Times reported on September 16 that Microsoft is planning to shut down Skype’s London offices. A Microsoft spokesperson with whom I spoke today characterized the London cuts as a consolidation of some engineering positions that affected both Skype and Yammer. The spokesperson said about 220 jobs would be eliminated as a result. After testing the waters for years, Microsoft has launched its first service, Azure Cloud Switch, that’s based on Linux.
Microsoft cut about 300 additional people globally this past week, the company spokesperson confirmed, with the majority of those cuts affecting those working in the Puget Sound, Wash., area. I saw a few people cut from various teams in Redmond earlier this week post about the cuts on Facebook.
In July 2016, Microsoft officials said they planned to cut 2,850 jobs this fiscal year (ending June 30, 2017), in addition to the 1,850 planned cuts announced in May 2016. At the time of that announcement, word was that the majority of the 2,850 in the new round of cuts had already been notified. The 2,850 cuts announced in July included 900 people cut as part of the restructuring of Microsoft’s sales organization.
In July 2015, Microsoft announced it would be cutting 7,400 people in fiscal 2016, primarily in the company’s phone hardware business. In February this year, Microsoft made more cuts connected with its phone hardware business that were not part of the original round of 7,400.
In May 2016, the company announced the aforementioned layoff of 1,850 jobs that were mostly connected to its phone hardware business. That May round of cuts didn’t include the 4,500 jobs that Microsoft shed by selling off its feature phone business to FIH Mobile. As of June 30, Microsoft employed about 114,000 people full-time, with 63,000 of those being in the US.
