Microsoft has confirmed another wave of job cuts, this time affecting 305 employees. The latest round of layoffs comes less than three weeks after the tech giant laid off more than 6,000 employees across its global workforce. The over-300 employees were fired from the Washington office. While the company did not confirm if additional staff outside Washington were affected, the company says that the latest cuts account for significantly less than 1 per cent of its total headcount, according to a report by The Seattle Times.

The reason for the layoffs? Microsoft reportedly has said in its official statement that it is implementing “organisational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.”

Reportedly, most of the staff that have been impacted in this round of layoffs were not in managerial roles. Software engineers and product managers appear to have been hit the hardest, while fewer than 17 per cent of the affected workers were in management positions.

This marks the second major round of layoffs for Microsoft in less than a month. In mid-May, the company slashed around 3 per cent of its global workforce (over 6,000 jobs) making it the most significant workforce reduction since early 2023, when it laid off 10,000 employees. Of those recent cuts, 1,985 were reportedly based in Washington. Put together with the recent 305 layoff figure, Microsoft has now let go of nearly 2,300 employees in Washington so far this year.

Earlier this year, the company had also done some performance-based job cuts, but Microsoft has now clarified that the more recent layoffs in May were not related to individual performance. The company has instead been attributing the recent cuts to organisational restructuring.

However, layoffs in January also came with a separate controversy, when Microsoft reportedly carried out performance-based terminations with no severance or healthcare benefits in some cases. At the time, reports surfaced of employees receiving immediate termination notices with access to company systems revoked on the same day.

As of last year, Microsoft employed about 228,000 people globally. While the company says the layoffs represent a small percentage of its workforce, the repeated cuts show how the priorities of Big Tech companies are changing with the face-paced evolution of AI. In 2025 alone, a number of tech companies across Silicon Valley including Google, Meta, and Amazon have laid off thousands of employees.