Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 employees in four countries

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 employees in the US, the UK, Canada and India, The Verge reports. In a message to staff, chief people officer Amy Coleman says the offer gives employees "the opportunity to leave Microsoft with financial support and career planning resources." According to The Verge, the company wants to reduce headcount without another round of layoffs.

The offer is much larger than anything Microsoft has tried before. Earlier this year the company ran a voluntary retirement program for roughly 9,000 long-serving US employees. The new offer reaches across countries and teams, and Microsoft says eligibility does not depend on age, length of service or performance.

Who is eligible

People familiar with the situation told The Verge that staff in these groups are eligible: AI experiences, Copilot, CoreAI, Windows + Devices, Xbox, finance and human resources. Cloud + AI, the MicrosoftAI teams, and corporate, external and legal affairs are taking part only in part. Marketing, commercial business, discovery and quantum, and security are not taking part.

The offer also leaves out the commercial sales teams. Those teams, together with Xbox, took most of the impact when Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees a few months ago. The Verge cites a Fortune report that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is planning further layoffs.

In a note on Microsoft's internal HRweb site, which The Verge has seen, the company says it may run future voluntary exit offers "where there is a business and workforce need." The reporting does not give the terms of the package or a deadline for employees to decide.

How it differs from the spring program

The earlier program was a retirement offer. Engadget, citing CNBC, reported in April that it covered US employees at senior director level and below whose age plus years of service came to 70 or more. Employees on sales incentive plans were excluded. Engadget's estimate was that up to 7 percent of Microsoft's roughly 125,000 US employees could qualify, or about 8,750 people. Coleman wrote at the time that she hoped the program would let eligible staff "take that next step on their own terms."

The new offer drops the age and tenure test. A mid-career engineer on the Copilot team in India can now be as eligible as a veteran finance manager in Redmond. Microsoft is no longer only managing a retirement wave. It is inviting people across large parts of the company to consider leaving.

Coleman presents the offer as an experiment. "The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us," she writes. "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."

A pattern of reshaping

The offer comes after a long run of workforce changes. Engadget reports that Microsoft cut roughly 15,000 jobs in May and July 2025. In 2026 so far there has been the retirement program, then the layoff of 4,800 people, and now this offer. In each case Microsoft chose who was affected by team, not across the whole company.

The excluded teams give a hint about priorities. Security, quantum research, marketing and commercial business are protected. Several AI product groups, including Copilot and CoreAI, are fully eligible. In the excerpts The Verge published, Microsoft does not say AI is a reason for the cuts. The memo talks about "different business needs," building new skills and focusing on "the work that matters most." Including AI teams suggests that what is changing is how the company organises work on AI, not only how much it spends on it.

A voluntary offer moves the decision from the company to the individual. Layoffs pick people. A buyout lets people pick themselves, with a financial incentive. That costs the company more per exit but avoids some of the disruption of forced cuts. Microsoft also gives up control over who leaves. Some of the people it would most like to keep may take the money.

What it means for work

Up to 60,000 people now have to decide whether to stay, without public details on what the package is worth or how long they have to choose. For staff in finance, human resources and product engineering, the offer shows that the company expects those functions to need fewer people, even though it has not said why. Workers in security and quantum got a different message: for now, their roles are not up for negotiation. Coleman's memo leaves room for future offers and links staying to building new skills, so people who stay are likely to be asked to change what they do. Two things remain open: how many people accept, and whether Microsoft treats this as a substitute for layoffs or a step before them.