Microsoft Voluntary Buyouts Open to Up to 60,000 Staff, Roughly 27% of Workforce

Microsoft voluntary buyouts are now on the table for as many as 60,000 employees, in one of the broadest workforce-reduction moves the company has attempted. Tom’s Hardware puts the eligible group at roughly 27% of Microsoft’s staff and frames the program as a response to the mounting cost of the AI buildout.

What Microsoft is offering

According to a memo from Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, the company is running a time-limited Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO). It is open to “eligible staff in participating teams” in the US, UK, Canada and India, at level 70 and below. The Verge, as cited by GamesIndustry.biz, reports that up to 60,000 people could qualify.

Eligibility is a ceiling, not a headcount. Nothing in the available reporting says how many employees will accept, and the terms, such as severance or payout levels, were not detailed in the material reviewed here.

Which teams are included

Sources familiar with the plan say the teams taking part include AI experiences, Copilot, CoreAI, Windows + Devices, Xbox, finance and human resources. Microsoft’s cloud + AI group, the MicrosoftAI teams, and corporate, external and legal affairs are described as “partially participating.”

The list is notable because it includes groups building Microsoft’s flagship AI products. That suggests the program is less a retreat from AI than a reshuffling of who works where as the company’s spending priorities shift.

A pattern of workforce moves

The exit offer follows a string of earlier steps. Earlier this year Microsoft ran a Voluntary Retirement Program limited to around 9,000 US employees whose age and years of service added up to at least 70. Layoffs followed in July and September, mostly across Xbox and commercial sales. GamesIndustry.biz also notes that further layoffs are allegedly planned, though that claim is unconfirmed.

Coleman presented the new program as a lesson carried over from the retirement effort. “The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us,” she wrote. “We’ll learn from it.” She said it reflects an effort at “creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter,” and added that there is “no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee.”

Why voluntary buyouts matter

Voluntary programs let a company thin its ranks without immediately resorting to involuntary cuts, though they can also lose people the company would have preferred to keep. Microsoft is pairing the offer with a promise to keep helping staff “build new skills” and, “where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft.”

The memo itself, as quoted, does not name AI spending as the motive. That link comes from Tom’s Hardware’s framing, and the sources do not include financial figures that would quantify it. What they do establish is the scale and timing: a company that has already trimmed Xbox and sales teams is now inviting a large share of its workforce to consider leaving on its own terms.

The key unknowns are how many employees take the offer, what it pays, and whether the reported additional layoffs follow. Those answers will show whether the Microsoft voluntary buyouts are a one-time experiment or a template for how the company restructures in the AI era.

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File photo: Aerial Microsoft West Campus August 2009.jpg by Jelson25, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.