Irish jobs at risk as Microsoft plans to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide

Microsoft's move could indicate that the tech sector may continue to shed jobs, 3,500 of which are in Ireland. 

Inside the Microsoft EMEA Operations Centre, Dublin, where the Global MBS Operations (Microsoft Business Solutions).

Microsoft said it plans to cut 10,000 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce this year, taking steps to cope with an increasingly bleak outlook that has now bruised many of the technology industry’s biggest companies.

The layoffs come as the software giant said it’s seeing customers exercise caution, with some parts of the world in recession and others heading toward one. Microsoft has significant operations in Ireland, employing 3,500 people here but the impact on staff here is not yet known.

In a blog post, the company said the cuts would take place up until the third quarter of this year with some impacted staff being notified today.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella cautioned the tech industry is going through a period of slowdown and will need to adjust.

“During the pandemic there was rapid acceleration. I think we’re going to go through a phase today where there is some amount of normalization in demand,” Nadella said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

“We will have to do more with less — we will have to show our own productivity gains with our own technology.” 

Cloud rival Amazon.com is set to begin a round of layoffs ultimately affecting more than 18,000 employees in the largest job cull in its history. Facebook parent Meta announced widespread job cuts last fall, and beleaguered social network Twitter has slashed about half its workforce. Corporate cloud-software maker Salesforce laid off about 10% of its workers earlier this month.

Bloomberg