Microsoft ended its fiscal 2023 in June with 221,000 employees globally, according to the company’s annual 10K filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That’s a decline of 11,000 people, or nearly 5%, from the company’s peak of 232,000 employees six months earlier, in December 2022, according to GeekWire’s calculations from Microsoft’s disclosures in regulatory filings, earnings calls, and the company’s website.
It’s the most rapid employment decline in Microsoft’s history, surpassing the pace (although not the ultimate size) of the company’s 18,000 job cuts in 2014 and 2015 after then-newly minted CEO Satya Nadella decided to largely reverse the company’s acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services business.
The new numbers show the impact of Microsoft’s job cuts announced in January, part of a wave of cutbacks across the technology industry at the time.
We calculated the figures below by comparing numbers in the latest 10K to those disclosed by the company in the same report in previous years. Microsoft declined our request to provide detailed numbers for the point in time six months ago, in December 2022, when the company reached its employment peak. As a result, these year-over-year numbers provide a before-and-after snapshot of the past year.
- After growing rapidly at the beginning of the fiscal year, Microsoft’s retrenchment meant that the company ended its fiscal 2023 with the same number of employees as one year earlier, 221,000, according to the new 10K filing.
- Even with the layoffs, the company’s international employment actually grew year-over-year, by 2,000 people, surpassing 100,000 for the first time.
- U.S. employment declined by 2,000 people year-over-year, to 120,000.
- Microsoft employees in sales and marketing roles saw the biggest year-over-year decline among the company’s four reported categories of employment, dropping by about 2,000 people, or 4%, from 47,000 in June 2022 to 45,000 in June 2023.
- Product research and development took a smaller hit, declining by about 1,000 people or a little more than 1% to 72,000 people year-over-year.
- Employees in operations roles increased by 4,000 people year-over-year, or nearly 5%, to 89,000 people, according to the 10K filing. Operations roles became the company’s largest category of employment in 2020.
Microsoft in the past disclosed its Seattle-area (aka Puget Sound region) employment figures on its Facts about Microsoft webpage, but the company has ended the practice in recent years. We’ve asked for the latest regional numbers and will update this post if Microsoft releases them.
