Leading tech giant Microsoft is preparing for another round of job cuts, targeting thousands of roles globally—mostly in sales and customer-facing teams—as reported by Bloomberg and other media sources.

Reportedly, the job cuts will begin in the first week of July 2025, affecting thousands of employees from its recently trimmed global workforce of 220,000.

Primarily, sales and customer-facing teams, totaling around 45,000 employees, are expected to be impacted. The layoff timeline aligns with the start of Microsoft’s new fiscal year on July 1.

The tech giant laid off over 6,000 employees in May 2025, primarily in engineering and product roles. At the time, CEO Satya Nadella described the layoffs as a strategic “painful but necessary" move. “This wasn’t about performance. It’s about priorities,” he said.

These layoffs are in line with Microsoft’s growing investment in artificial intelligence and data center projects, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The report also noted that the company has budgeted around $80 billion in capital expenditure for this fiscal year, with a significant portion allocated to expanding data centers and easing capacity bottlenecks for AI services. Microsoft has declined to comment on the matter.

Internal sources told the media that a couple of months ago, the tech giant disclosed plans to use third-party firms to handle a significant portion of software sales to small and mid-sized customers. Subsequently, the layoffs in engineering and product roles were carried out.

In June 2023, Microsoft laid off over 10,000 employees globally, a move attributed to over-hiring during the pandemic. This pattern of fresh job cuts highlights the company’s ongoing strategic shifts. 

Recently, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy hinted that tech layoffs will continue—not as a short-term fix, but as part of a structural shift driven by generative AI. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today. In the next few years, we expect this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we gain efficiency through AI used extensively across the company.”

“AI agents will let you tell them what you want… and do things like scour the web, write code, find anomalies, highlight insights… and automate a lot of tasks that consume our time. We’re going to keep pushing to operate like the world’s largest startup… customer-obsessed, inventive, fast-moving, lean, scrappy,” he added.

Similarly, Meta, Google, IBM, and other tech giants are regularly trimming roles as they race to become AI-first companies. In 2025, over 60,000 job cuts have taken place in the tech industry globally. 

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An ex-Microsoft employee affected by the 2023 layoffs shared a strikingly unempathetic experience. He shared, "Microsoft laid me off in January 2023. I got a meeting invite at the same time as the internal email went out. I’m the one who told my leadership team I was one of them.

• Email/ Meeting invite at 6am
• Boss had a team meeting at 8am
• Laid off at 10am

I was told I wasn’t expected to work on any projects after 10am. I lost access to or team files that Friday. But still had corporate access for 60 days to apply for other positions."

While companies may need to shift strategic priorities, how they communicate layoffs truly matters. Employees deserve transparency and empathy—not abrupt, impersonal notices. Employers can go beyond what's stated in the contract by helping affected employees find new jobs, either within the organisation or through external support like career counselling. At the very least, they should offer meaningful support during such a difficult transition.