Almost 1,000 Microsoft Layoffs in California This Year, According to Official Pages Tied to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act
There are many headlines, "tweets" (X, unverified hearsay), clickbait, anecdotes*, and chatbot-spewed fake 'articles' about Microsoft layoffs (we see some every day), but to eliminate this 'fog of war' let's examine Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) entries for California and have a look at raw data. Disturbingly enough, California uses proprietary Microsoft formats (OOXML) for this data, with no other option available, so we've sorted the notifications by company and made this ODF version available. Here are entries associated with Microsoft:
This last one shows the extent to which people in just one state were subjected to Microsoft's 2024 cull. Of course workers in other states were affected as well, but the data for each state comes from a separate site. There are many in Washington state, e.g. 276 in Redmond and Bellevue (click "4" in the pagination part).
Those lists aren't complete. They rely on "good faith" disclosures from the companies that lay off the staff or announce closure. █
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* The following is a few hours old:
A Novato gaming company is set to lay off 86 employees at the end of March, according to the state.
The employees work for Activision Blizzard developer Toys for Bob, which was incorporated in 2002. The developer is known for titles such as “Crash Bandicoot,” “Spyro” and “Skylanders.”
Activision, whose titles include “Call of Duty,” acquired the Toys for Bob studio for an undisclosed price in 2005.
[...]
In addition to the layoffs in Novato, the state’s latest WARN notice — the acronym refers to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act — contains an additional 812 Activision layoffs effective on March 30 throughout the state: 478 in Irvine, 209 in Santa Monica, 76 in San Mateo and 49 in Woodland Hills.