Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 staff, a quarter of its workforce

Employees up to vice-president level on many teams in the US, Canada, India and the UK can take a voluntary exit offer. Microsoft is spending heavily on AI data centres and wants to protect its finances while it does.

By Roman Aglaganov26 OCT 2026North America

Illustration: a large grid of small grey figures as dots, with a band of them fading out towards an open doorway, and one red dot at the door — Illustration: AI Pulse.

Microsoft said on 26 October that it is offering voluntary buyouts to employees in the US, Canada, India and the UK. About 60,000 people are eligible, roughly 27% of its 223,000 staff, according to a person familiar with the matter quoted by CNBC. The company confirmed the figure to TechCrunch.

The offer

It is open to employees at level 70 and below in Microsoft’s ranking, which goes up to vice-president, on participating teams. Bloomberg reported that divisions including Xbox, Windows, Copilot and Finance are taking part, while some sales, marketing, data-centre and engineering teams are not. Staff must decide in early December and those who accept leave on 31 December. A spokesperson said the terms are comparable to Microsoft’s standard severance package.

“The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we’re evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter,” Amy Coleman, the chief people officer, wrote in a memo. “The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us,” she added. “We’ll learn from it.”

The AI backdrop

Microsoft is spending heavily on data centres to serve AI demand from customers including OpenAI and Anthropic; it said its capital spending for the September quarter would exceed $50 billion. CNBC reports that the company wants to make the shift without weakening its finances. A Microsoft spokesperson told the Seattle station KUOW that AI is not driving the buyouts.

This follows a voluntary retirement offer in April, taken by more than 30% of the roughly 8,750 eligible US staff, and 4,800 layoffs announced in July. CNBC’s source said there is no target for how many people take the new offer.

Why it matters

A buyout is gentler than a layoff, but the scale is striking: a quarter of one of the world’s biggest software companies has been invited to leave. Whatever Microsoft says about the cause, the pattern across big tech is the same: record spending on AI infrastructure, and pressure to pay for it by spending less on people.