Keeping Track of Microsoft Layoffs in 2025
When our wiki was still a real wiki we kept track of Microsoft layoffs for 15+ years. We abandoned the wiki (PHP back end with a very large database) for reasons explained here quite meticulously just a day ago (the Web is full of malicious, reckless bots; that's the upshot - a dead Web).
So here's a quick roundup of 2025. The dates (in bold) are estimates.
Microsoft started the year by laying off thousands (weeks 2-3 in January), first saying it was based on performance (smokescreen aside), then the media revealing there was another wave (late January), unrelated to workers' relative performance. Then, by February, another wave of layoffs happened, impacting many in "cloud" (early February, to name some signs). That meant 3 waves in 2 months (catching up with December/Christmas after 11 consecutive months of mass layoffs at Microsoft in 2024). On the last day of March the media in Hong Kong revealed that Microsoft had silently shut down whole labs and laid off many staff, probably a month or two earlier (nobody can say for sure when the decision and implementation happened). As evidence it presented photographs of the now-abandoned main building. The Microsoft logo had already been peeled off. Only about a week later, during a period of Microsoft "Feeding Frenzy" in "the media" (sponsored by Microsoft), an additional 2,000 layoffs were revealed (this past Monday). That happened earlier this week, but the "corporate" or "mainstream" media was too busy worshipping Bill Gates and a fake version (or pseudo-history) of Microsoft. Today, as of ~6 hours ago, we learn of another large wave of layoffs in the making. It's likely to be confirmed imminently.
Some hours ago they wrote: "A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment."
So they're not denying it. They could do. They were given the chance. No denial.
Keeping track of all these layoffs and telling them apart is ever more crucial* due to LLM slop, AstroTurfing, revisionism, and search engines getting a lot worse, more so as real news sites go under, only to be replaced by slop plagiarism (such as Quartz). █
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* An associate suggested that we "close the [previous] post with a summary of this year's layoffs to-date," which is generally a good suggestion, but we really want an outline to stand out as its own post, knowing we don't plan to resurrect a wiki or anything non-static. The associate said it's ever more crucial "with the suggestion that the year is still rather fresh" (about 100 days), so 5,000+ Microsoft layoffs would be like 50+ layoffs per day, not counting people leaving, getting "pushed out", or "retiring" (often against their true will). That's also not counting temps and contractors, the "shadow workforce" which lacks rights (Microsoft has no real obligations to them).