Microsoft Expands Voluntary Buyouts to Up to 60,000 Employees

Microsoft is opening a voluntary buyout program to as many as 60,000 employees, a sweep that touches roughly a quarter of its global workforce of about 223,000. The offer, detailed in a memo from chief people officer Amy Coleman, spans the US, UK, Canada, and India, and is pitched as a way for staff to leave "with financial support and career planning resources," according to The Verge.

The program is Microsoft's latest attempt to shrink its headcount without resorting to another straight round of layoffs. Sources familiar with the situation told The Verge that eligibility is broad but uneven. Employees on the AI experiences, Copilot, CoreAI, Windows + Devices, Xbox, finance, and human resources teams can all apply. Microsoft's cloud + AI and MicrosoftAI groups, along with corporate, external, and legal affairs, are only partially included. Marketing, commercial business, discovery and quantum, and security teams are sitting this one out entirely, and commercial sales isn't part of the offer at all.

That patchwork says a lot about where Microsoft sees overlap or excess right now, and where it doesn't. Teams tied to the company's AI push are notably included rather than shielded, even as Microsoft continues to pour resources into that side of the business. Meanwhile, the sales organization — which took the brunt of the company's last layoff round — is excluded here, suggesting Microsoft is trying to spread the pain differently this time rather than cutting the same group twice.

A pattern of trimming without the optics of layoffs

This buyout push lands just months after Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees, a round that primarily hit Xbox and commercial sales staff, per the report. It's also not the company's first attempt at a voluntary exit this year. Earlier in 2026, Microsoft ran a retirement offer aimed at long-tenured employees, but that one was much narrower: it applied to around 9,000 US workers at a certain job level whose combined age and years of service added up to 70 or more.

This new program is a different animal, both in scale and in who qualifies. There's no tenure formula gatekeeping access, and it reaches across four countries instead of just the US. Coleman called it something the company hasn't tried before. "The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us," she wrote in the memo. "We'll learn from it."

The timing also overlaps with other signs of restructuring inside Microsoft's gaming division. Fortune has reported that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is planning additional layoffs, separate from this buyout offer. Taken together, it points to a company still actively reshaping its workforce on multiple fronts at once, rather than treating its earlier layoffs as a one-time correction.

Why voluntary exits instead of more cuts

Buyout offers let a company reduce headcount while avoiding the public and internal fallout that comes with forced layoffs. Employees who take the deal leave on their own terms, with some financial cushion and support for what comes next, rather than being shown the door. For Microsoft, repeating layoffs within the same year risks signaling instability to employees and investors alike. A voluntary program is a quieter lever to pull.

Coleman's memo frames the effort as part of a broader, team-by-team strategy rather than a company-wide mandate. "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," she wrote, adding that "there is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee."

That language suggests Microsoft is trying to manage headcount with more precision than a blanket layoff allows, trimming where it sees redundancy while still funneling people toward growth areas internally. Whether 60,000 eligible employees translates into a meaningful number of actual departures remains to be seen. Voluntary programs often see only a fraction of eligible staff opt in, and Microsoft hasn't indicated a target number it expects to leave.

What's clear is that Microsoft isn't done adjusting its workforce. Between this buyout round, the earlier retirement offer, the layoffs from earlier in the year, and now reported plans for further cuts within Xbox, the company is working through its headcount in stages rather than all at once. For employees across the eligible divisions, the next question is simple: does the exit package look better than staying put while the reshuffling continues.