Microsoft Confirms About 60,000 Employees Eligible For Voluntary Exit Offer

‘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,’ says Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman.

Microsoft has confirmed to CRN that about 60,000 of its employees are eligible for a new voluntary exit offer launched as the technology giant continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure to enable artificial intelligence and meet AI demand.

That number is about 27 percent of the 223,000 global workforce the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor had as of June 30. The buyout offer also comes days before the tech giant’s next quarterly earnings call and months after Microsoft launched a voluntary retirement program and conducted a separate layoff round, each resulting in thousands of departures.

Some marketing, sales and engineering teams aren’t participating in the exit offer, according to CNBC. Employees have until December to decide on accepting the offer. Participants will leave Dec. 31.

Amy Coleman, Microsoft executive vice president and chief people officer, said in a statement Monday that the exit offer “builds on what we learned earlier this year through the Voluntary Retirement Program” that thousands of Microsoft employees participated in.

“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.

The vendor has about 500,000 partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2026 Channel Chiefs.

Wayne Roye, CEO of New York-based Microsoft solution provider Troinet, told CRN in a recent interview that his customers are showing demand not only for Microsoft AI products but also for back-to-basics reviews of company policies and guardrails to ready organizations for the AI age.

Part of his work with Microsoft customers has been making sure they use the full Microsoft stack under whatever license they’ve purchased.

“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,” Roye said. “So we're coming back now and revisiting.”

How Microsoft's Voluntary Exit Offer Works

The exit offer is eligible to Microsoft employees in Canada, India, the U.K. and the U.S. at level 70 and below, according to Coleman’s Monday post.

That includes senior leaders in the company, according to Business Insider. Sales organizations, some engineering ones and some corporate functions are not participating.

The program is time-limited and gives participants “financial support and career planning resources.” Not every Microsoft organization is participating, but Coleman did not give details on which ones are.

“The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us,” she said. “We’ll learn from it. At the same time, we’ll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee. These are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”

Microsoft reports earnings on Wednesday for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year. The quarter ended Sept. 30. Microsoft expects to spend $175 billion in capital expenditures (CapEx) in 2026.

Microsoft's 2026 Layoffs And Workforce Reductions

After a period of mass layoffs by Microsoft in 2025—spanning May 2025’s 6,000 job cutsand July 2025’s 9,000 cuts—the vendor’s workforce reductions continued into this year.

In 2026, reports of buyouts through a voluntary retirement program emerged in April. Microsoft disclosed in a blog post on July 6 that more than 30 percent of eligible employees participated in the program, putting the number of employees retiring at around 3,000.

Assuming a similar participation rate for the new voluntary exit offer, that puts the actual number of Microsoft employees who depart at 18,000, about 8 percent of Microsoft’s global workforce.

The tech giant acknowledged “lower-than-expected expenses related to the Voluntary Retirement Program” in its July 29 report for its fourth fiscal quarter, ended June 30.

Microsoft also revealed in that July 6 blog post that it eliminated around 4,800 roles, which translated into about 2.1 percent of its global workforce at the time. The cuts were concentrated in its commercial and Xbox gaming organizations. The creation of a Microsoft Frontier Co. that embeds engineers alongside customers was also cited as a factor in the cuts.

The retirement program helped cut down on the number of layoffs Microsoft conducted, according to GeekWire.

As of July, Microsoft had redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles over the past year, including another 500 that month, according to the vendor.

In the July post, Coleman said that those eliminated roles “are not being replaced by AI” while acknowledging “that AI is changing how work gets done.” She did not mention AI in Monday’s blog post about the voluntary exit offer.

Microsoft’s annual report this year showed 223,000 employees as of June, down 5,000 from the prior year. Microsoft has shown it can do more with the same or less headcount, with revenue per employee at $1.5 million the past fiscal year, up from $1.1 million the prior year, according to a Monday report from KeyBanc.

The investment bank attributed the new exit offer to Microsoft's efforts to preserve margins even as infrastructure costs to enable the AI age ramp up.

Microsoft joins other tech giants in letting go of employees as they move investments into the AI opportunity and see business demand change in the agentic AI era. Other vendors to announce layoffs or conduct job cuts in recent weeks include Intel, Oracle, Nutanix and Cisco.