Microsoft Layoffs: Microsoft’s wave of layoffs isn’t over yet. The tech giant has let go of 40 more employees in Washington, bringing the total number of job cuts in the state this year to 3,160, according to a state filing on Monday, Moneycontrol reported. The layoffs come even as the company continues to make massive investments in its AI platform, Copilot.
US influencer Amanda Goodall claims that she has been receiving messages from the employees who the tech giant laid off.
‘I worked for Microsoft for over 15 years’
“Still getting messages about Microsoft layoffs,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter), before sharing an array of anonymous messages she received from the affected employees.
One message she received was: “We were told not to post on LinkedIn. Not to say anything.”
Another expressed, “I worked for Microsoft for 15+ years. My crime? Being over 55.”
“My COBRA quote was $1,600/month. I had to scramble for private insurance the same day,” a third texted her.
A fourth claimed, “They turned off the angry reaction in Xbox town halls after mass layoffs. The chat was a sea of sarcastic emojis.”
‘Microsoft’s culture shifted heavily due to AI’
One Microsoft employee, in a post on Reddit, said that he was recently laid off as the company has been shifting resources toward expanding its AI infrastructure. He joined the company three years ago, and back then, the company preferred “people skills and technical understanding”. However, this soon changed in 2024 when AI started driving profits.
He claimed that his manager began closely monitoring his use of AI tools, asking how frequently he was leveraging them, how many pull requests he was completing each week, and even encouraging him to give talks about his experience using AI as a developer.
While he personally found Copilot to be an underwhelming product at the time, he admitted that its future potential is promising.
Microsoft Layoffs 2025
Microsoft began trimming its workforce in May 2025, laying off over 6,000 employees, and followed it up with another 9,000 job cuts in July. As of now, the company has laid off 3,160 workers in Washington state alone this year.
In an official Microsoft blog titled “Recommitting to our why, what, and how”, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the layoffs as “among the most difficult” decisions the company made, adding, “I feel the immense weight of the choices we’ve had to make.”
“I also want to acknowledge the uncertainty and seeming incongruence of the times we’re in. By every objective measure, Microsoft is thriving—our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right. We’re investing more in CapEx than ever before. Our overall headcount is relatively unchanged, and some of the talent and expertise in our industry and at Microsoft is being recognised and rewarded at levels never seen before,” he added.
According to a Moneycontrol report, Microsoft has poured $88 billion into AI infrastructure over the past year and is set to invest an additional $30 billion by September 2025.
Nadella further wrote, “And yet, at the same time, we’ve undergone layoffs.”
In 2025 alone, over 15,000 employees were laid off by the company, but still the headcount remains the same as that of last year – 228,000. This is because, despite laying off employees, the company continued hiring in other areas.
A Microsoft spokesperson, in a statement to CFO Dive, has said that the layoffs and the H-1B visas were unrelated. The company said that over one year, the company mostly filed for extensions for the existing employees and not for the new ones.
“Our H-1B applications are in no way related to the recent job eliminations, in part because employees on H-1Bs also lost their roles,” the company said in a statement, before adding, “In the past 12 months, 78 percent of the petitions we filed were extensions for existing employees and not new employees coming to the US.”
Vice President JD Vance came down heavily last week over the layoffs at the tech giant. He said that the company has laid off people and then applied for overseas visas, adding that “displacement and that maths worries him a bit”.
“You see some Big Tech companies where they’ll lay off 9,000 workers, and then they’ll apply for a bunch of overseas visas. That displacement and that math worries me a bit…I don’t want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then say, ‘We can’t find workers here in America’. That story doesn’t make sense,” he had said.