Microsoft made another round of layoffs this past week, GeekWire has learned.
A company representative confirmed the job cuts in response to our inquiry this morning. The cuts are part of the final stages of the 18,000 layoffs announced by Microsoft last year as part of a broader restructuring initiative.
We’re hearing from other sources that hundreds of jobs were cut in this latest round, with Microsoft’s IT department getting hit the hardest. Some but not all of the cuts were at the company’s Redmond headquarters.
Microsoft said in late October that it had completed “almost all” of the 18,000 cuts planned through the restructuring, but the company has given itself until the end of its fiscal year, June 30, to complete the process.
The overall reduction of 18,000 positions represents about 14 percent of the 127,000 people employed by the company as of last June. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the time of the original announcement that the goal was to have “fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making.”
A disproportionate number of the overall cuts, about 12,500, were in the Nokia smartphone workforce. Affected employees receive severance packages and assistance from the company.
