Microsoft Offers Buyouts to About 60,000 Employees

In a bid to lower costs tied to its historic spending on AI infrastructure, Microsoft announced that it is offering buyouts to about 60,000 eligible employees.

“Today, we’re introducing a new Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) to eligible employees within participating organizations,” Microsoft executive vice president Amy Coleman wrote in an email to employees today. “This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support. It also gives participating organizations another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs.”

The Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) follows a July voluntary retirement program targeting 7 percent of Microsoft U.S.-based employees. In that purge, about 30 percent of the 8,750 eligible employees opted to leave the company.

This offer is broader and is available to eligible employees in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States at level 70 [vice president] and below. It’s available for a limited time, Coleman says, and employees will receive an email today if they’re eligible.

Coleman also admits that the VEO, like the previous voluntary retirement offer, is an attempt to correct the wrongs of Microsoft’s many chaotic layoffs in 2024 and 2025.

“The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us,” she says. “We’ll learn from it. At the same time, we’ll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee. These are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”

Microsoft currently has about 223,000 employees worldwide.