Microsoft Opens Voluntary Exit Offer to 60,000 Employees

About 60,000 Microsoft employees — roughly 27 percent of the company's 223,000-person global workforce as of June 30 — are eligible for a new voluntary exit offer, the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor confirmed to CRN. It's the company's third major workforce-reduction mechanism in under a year, and it lands days before Microsoft's quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, covering its first fiscal quarter of 2027, which ended Sept. 30.

Who can take the exit offer?

The offer covers employees in Canada, India, the U.K. and the U.S. at level 70 and below — a band that, per Business Insider, includes senior leaders. Sales organizations, some engineering groups and certain corporate functions aren't participating. Employees have until December to decide; participants leave Dec. 31.

Chief People Officer Amy Coleman framed the program as flexibility, not forced cuts. "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," Coleman said Monday. She added that the offer "builds on what we learned earlier this year through the Voluntary Retirement Program" and provides "financial support and career planning resources." She did not mention AI in Monday's post.

How many people might actually leave?

The retirement program earlier this year drew more than 30 percent of eligible employees, about 3,000 people, Microsoft disclosed in a July 6 blog post. Apply that same rate to the new offer and roughly 18,000 employees — about 8 percent of the global workforce — could walk out the door.

The backdrop matters here. Microsoft cut 6,000 jobs in May 2025 and another 9,000 in July 2025. It then eliminated around 4,800 more roles in 2026, about 2.1 percent of its workforce at the time, concentrated in commercial and Xbox gaming organizations, with the creation of Microsoft Frontier Co. — which embeds engineers alongside customers — cited as a factor. GeekWire reported the retirement program helped reduce the number of layoffs. Microsoft has also redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles over the past year, including 500 in July alone.

In that July post, Coleman said the eliminated roles "are not being replaced by AI," while acknowledging "that AI is changing how work gets done."

What's driving it financially?

Microsoft expects to spend $175 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, mostly on AI infrastructure. KeyBanc reported Monday that Microsoft's revenue per employee hit $1.5 million last fiscal year, up from $1.1 million, and attributed the exit offer to margin preservation as infrastructure costs climb. Headcount is already down 5,000 year over year.

Microsoft isn't alone: Intel, Oracle, Nutanix and Cisco have all announced or conducted job cuts in recent weeks as investment shifts toward AI. Meanwhile, the company's roughly 500,000 partners worldwide — per CRN's 2026 Channel Chiefs — are seeing customers demand not just AI products but back-to-basics governance. "Did you set baseline policies? How do you onboard a new employee? How do you exit an employee? Those standard basic things that you think everybody should have, it's not really there," said Wayne Roye, CEO of New York-based Microsoft solution provider Troinet.

With a December decision deadline and an earnings call this week, expect Microsoft's actual AI-era headcount math to become clearer by early 2027.