Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees, or roughly a quarter of its workforce, as the company tries to control its head count while avoiding layoffs.

The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant announced Monday morning that eligible employees at the vice president level and below in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom would receive a “voluntary exit offer” of a standard severance package, based on their location. They’ll have until early December to decide.

In a memo to employees, Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said the move was building off the voluntary retirement program earlier this year, which was available to more than 8,700 U.S.-based employees, roughly one-third of whom took the offer.

“This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support,” Coleman wrote. “It also gives participating organizations another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs.”

Multiple organizations within Microsoft are fully participating in the company’s buyout program including the gaming, Windows, Copilot, human resources and finance divisions, according to a screenshot of an internal memo viewed by The Seattle Times. Microsoft’s artificial intelligence, legal and cloud teams are partially participating. Organizations such as marketing, commercial business and security will not be participating.

Since May 2025, Microsoft has been trying to reduce its corporate workforce, first through waves of mass layoffs and now through more creative buyout programs. The company laid off about 15,000 employees last year over the course of several months, affecting about 3,200 Washington-based workers.

Microsoft said it was enacting layoffs to create a flatter, more nimble company, with fewer layers of management and more accountability per employee, essentially blurring the line between employee and manager. The company was also cutting costs as its capital expenditures – investments in AI-related infrastructure – ballooned in 2024 and kept growing in 2025. Microsoft said earlier this year it plans to spend $190 billion on custom computer chips and data centers in 2025, fueled by AI demand.

Layoffs have continued this year, however they’ve been smaller and have mostly affected the company’s gaming division, which is under new leadership and in the middle of a hard reset.

But after last year’s layoffs, leadership took note of the souring culture. Microsoft was posting better financial results and bringing in more cash than ever, while employees felt blindsided by layoffs. After Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed this incongruence in July 2025, Coleman and others spent the past year trying to reshape the company amid an AI-driven shift.

Coleman said in July that Microsoft’s workforce reductions were not driven by AI, at least not by what people would expect. Microsoft says it is not replacing workers by AI agents or workflows. But aside from cost-cutting measures, the company says its various workforce reduction efforts are geared toward shedding outdated roles and teams as AI changes the business.

In response to the AI-driven platform shift, Microsoft is trying to reskill and relocate workers and is still hiring, keeping its overall head count relatively flat over the past few years. Even after massive layoffs last year, the company’s workforce only dipped by 5,000 between 2025 and 2026.

Earlier this year, Microsoft President Brad Smith told The Seattle Times that the company’s Redmond workforce of about 52,000 remained relatively unchanged over the past year, despite thousands of workers affected by layoffs. The company credited that to reskilling efforts and increased hiring for new teams.

“The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it,” Coleman wrote on Monday. “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.”

©2026 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.