The Seattle-based computing giant is laying off thousands of staff in a reorganisation around selling cloud computing infrastructure and services
Microsoft is cutting around ten percent of its global sales force as part of a broad reorganisation to focus on selling its cloud services under the Azure brand.
In an official statement the company said: “Microsoft is implementing changes to better serve our customers and partners. Today, we are taking steps to notify some employees that their jobs are under consideration or that their positions will be eliminated.
“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time-to-time, re-deployment in others.”
With a global salesforce of 50,000 people this could mean 5,000 people, most likely in software and hardware divisions, are going to be out of work. However CNBC reports a more conservative figure of 3,000. The majority of these roles will be outside of the USA, the company told the Washington Post. Microsoft employs 3,000 people in the UK in total.
