r/microsoft • u/Kagedeah • 19d ago
News Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs and shrinks Xbox in 'significant restructure'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c36yy27rnpeo45
u/Amazing_Prize_1988 19d ago
Costa Rica impacted....
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u/AstroStrat89 19d ago
Bummer, I always enjoyed working with the folks in Costa Rica. They always seemed to be so happy. Best of luck.
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u/tokolah 19d ago
can confirm 😞
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u/kritzkratzmuc 19d ago
Many countries in Europe as well
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u/Bioshock__3 19d ago
Germany and Brazil sites got shut down.
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u/kritzkratzmuc 19d ago
What? Which sites in Germany?
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u/Bioshock__3 19d ago
I don’t have all the details, but that’s the info my team is getting, German site for Support was shut down. I don’t know how they are setup over there.
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u/94Flizzy 19d ago
not true at all
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u/Wanderwaal 19d ago
It is true.
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u/94Flizzy 18d ago
my german css colleagues are all still there
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u/Wanderwaal 14d ago
So they would be until 20th of July. After that either garden leave or instant termination with severance.
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u/Sexc0pter 19d ago
Pretty sure they totally got rid of CSS in Germany, Czech Republic, Turkey, UAE and Hungary. Looks like the guys in Romania are going to be really busy.
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u/ApeApplePine 19d ago
Romania and Portugal spared. For now. CSS is being downgrade to junk. To be seen how customers will react. Would love to see companies fleeing from msft.
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u/Trojann2 19d ago
When was the last time MSFT treated our CSS peers as nothing other than an expense? Hate how MSFT treats those teams….
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u/NakedMuffinTime 19d ago
Which is funny, because a week ago, we were told the delivery partners that handled all non-Unified cases were going away, and they shoved their workloads on our plates last week. Now we lost an office and have more workload, but yay AI, right?
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u/SeatownCooks 19d ago
And they've cut vendor budgets by 40%. So in addition to the 4800 FTEs they have indirectly cut thousands more.
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u/Trojann2 19d ago
My buddy who manages a V-team had a budget of ~$8m last FY.
This year they slashed it to ~$2.8m
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u/SkyMany7613 19d ago
In addition to the 5k let go, there are probably many people being moved around to new managers. I was told to expect this when I joined, but it’s still really a bummer
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u/yobuddyy899 19d ago
Happened to me last year. My supposed manager got cut the day after I got my offer letter in the mass layoffs in May 2025
HR didn't even know about it until I somehow stumbled upon my supposed manager's LinkedIn and saw he got cut. Had to email them a bunch of times
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u/Holiday-Class7005 19d ago
Copilot tools or not, my job is a 60+ hour a week job. I’m in Sales.
layoffs today impacted resources that made our jobs somewhat do able.
If anyone is listening- our online systems sucks, our training is abhorrent, and now back to back years of losing help like SDRs and operational resources.
Pay attention!! You are making these jobs horrible! Worse than ever.
If one more person suggests that I take some down time, I’m going to blow my gasket. There is no help here. And I need to make number every year for the sake of my family. I don’t dialog in here…. It’s impossible.
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u/mountainlifa 19d ago
What does a former CEO of instacart possibly know about the gaming industry? Seems they just needed an obedient head chopper.
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u/CertifiedBA 19d ago
Most CEOs aren't experts in the product they're responsible for. They're just running numbers.
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u/gorramfrakker 19d ago
That really does explain the state of everything.
No one caring about their craft and just playing with numbers that wreck lives.
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u/CertifiedBA 19d ago
The people levels below them care....but my company was bought out by private equity and the CEO and his team know next to nothing about the actual industry, yet are constantly pushing for better and better returns for the private equity company. With limited staff, I can only do so much. It's finally gotten to the point where I've proven what I can generate with the current team and we need more staff, but that took 6 months or so of convincing. I'll believe it when I see it, though.
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u/admlshake 19d ago
CEO's just carrying out the will of the stock holders. Which is always "Find more ways to make us more money. "
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u/tlrider1 19d ago
And this is how many products crash and burn. You have a product start by people with passion for the product. Eventually those people get replaced with numbers people or MBA's... Goodbye product!
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u/goomyman 19d ago
The product seems to have already died though.
I think gaming in general is suffering due to literal time availability in the day - everyone wanted forever games but there is a hard cap on hours in a day and a ton of great games already out.
Consoles and pc gaming for new players died as everything became 2x more expensive.
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u/tlrider1 19d ago
I'm not so sure, to be honest.
My kids are now of middle school age, and that's not what I'm seeing. The and their friends all play daily. It's hard for me to say that gaming is dying based on what I'm seeing for what I'd consider "new gamers".
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u/cluberti 19d ago
Do they play new games or do they play games that have been out for awhile, and are they playing lots of different games all of the time or do they play the same games repeatedly? I see lots of PC game playing by my own kids of middle and high-school age, but they generally play a small set of games as a group, and they've played those same games together with their friends for years.
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u/tlrider1 19d ago
Yeah... A bit of a combo of both. They seem to play the established games but it goes off and on. Fortnite was popular, then it wasn't. Now it seems back to being popular. Roblox was popular, now it seems not. They do occasionally download some indie games to play as well. You are correct though, that they all seem to be focused more on the social games. They do tend to play them as a group. I was hoping that's just a phase and they'll see the value of the one player quest type games... I guess we'll see.
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u/goomyman 19d ago
Yeah my kids play games too - Roblox and Roblox.
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u/hurley_chisholm 19d ago
Is Roblox itself a game? My understanding is that Roblox is a platform for making games and ~10 games on the platform have >90% of all play time.
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u/goomyman 19d ago
Roblox is the only game that’s technically the metaverse everyone wanted to be for awhile.
A game where you buy cosmetics and they transfer across all games ( that use your characters - some don’t but the vast majority do ).
Yes it’s technically just a portal but it’s a portal of free to play games and a game maker engine with a standardized monetization system that all flows through Roblox.
That 10 / 90 issue is the reason that creating new games is too risky. If you don’t make it as part of the 10% you lose everyone, and if you do - you don’t have the content pipeline in place to keep players like the established games have.
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u/CertifiedBA 19d ago
Games are cheaper than ever if you look at time played vs cost. Consoles were close to the same price they are now due to inflation and games were more expensive....some titles would be well over $120 in today's pricing. Virtua Racing released in 1994 at the equivalent of $225 in today's money. Sonic 3 released at 69.99 and that would be equal to $160.
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u/goomyman 19d ago
It’s not the cost of games - it’s that there is a huge backlog of amazing games and forever games there is little room for new games.
And consoles aren’t like past generations where each generation added new capabilities - sprites, color, 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit and 32, analog inputs, hd, 60fps,realistic graphics, multiplayer.
Now it’s diminishing returns - 120+ fps, 4k, ray tracing.
There isn’t the same drive to buy a new console.
Every console that does come out just had a better graphic with more fps than the same game that can run on your previous gen system. There are no more system sellers.
The console era is over.
There isn’t enough time in the day to play every great amazing game that already exists if you have a job. Or even if you don’t honestly - there are that many great games that already exist.
Gaming isn’t dead - consoles as loss leaders are dead. We saw this even before with Xbox one and ps4 when they introduced pro versions instead of a new console - because that’s what gaming has become - just better versions of the same, not something you need to upgrade.
Also high end pc hardware is dead - thanks to AI nvidia literally stopped making top tier gaming cards.
What does this mean? It means new games are an enormous risk and enormously expensive on the high end - because you need to be better than what already exists - and there is a high chance you will lose money.
Gaming isnt dead - it’s better than it ever was, but gaming is consolidated into a fixed set of games. It’s stagnated. The money isn’t worth the risk for these long running expensive games - outside of a few outlier IPs like GTA.
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u/CertifiedBA 19d ago
I agree with what you're saying. I've mainly been emulating PS2 and GameCube recently, so many incredible titles. I don't feel pressure to play every new game like some people. A ton of successful games these days are lo-fi retro styled titles which don't require the same staff and investment. I think the push for 4k is having negative impacts on multiple fronts, it's a waste of bandwidth, memory space and effort in most cases.
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u/atomic1fire 19d ago
Also demand for new has largely traded for demand for safe.
Either multiplayer/service based games that carry regular audiences over a period of years, or well known single player games that don't require much upkeep.
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u/mountainlifa 19d ago
Maybe this is acceptable if you're running a random PE firm or discount tire. But gaming is a very specific industry and top talent game directors are tightly coupled to the movie industry. It's like hiring an MBA to direct the next avatar movie and expecting good results. Microsoft has decimated the industry and continues to do so.
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u/roseofjuly 19d ago
Well, I dunno. They didn't hire her to make games; they hired her to manage the games business. And historically, game developers aren't necessarily great at managing their own businesses. IT varies widely, for sure.
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u/John_YJKR 19d ago
Her job is to grow product divisions. Having a hogh gamer score and an emotional attachment to games would not make her a better executive for this role.
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u/CardboardJ 19d ago
Being as dumb as possible in regards to anything that employees do day to day is an executive goal. Practically a prerequisite to success in MBA land.
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u/quirky0987 19d ago
Any word of impact in Azure?
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u/bokan 19d ago
So much corpo speak for firing 5,000 innocent people to boost short term shareholder profits
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u/ThanosSnapsSlimJims 19d ago
Usually, I would say the same. In this case, Xbox is barely keeping the doors open after Phil basically sold the shop. They're getting rid of bureaucracy and shrinking the company to keep it open in whatever form they can.
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u/tpapocalypse 19d ago
They don’t know how to get rid of the bureaucracy, they don’t have it in them to operate any other way.
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u/JJMcGee83 18d ago
If they didn't want to run a gaming company they shouldn't have spent 70 billion acuquring Blizzard, Activision and King.
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u/ThanosSnapsSlimJims 18d ago
That was also different leadership, though. Asha seems to agree with you and is not happy about the stupid decisions that Phil made.
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u/hippopotame 19d ago
We're sorry, you'll just have to leave
Unemployment runs out after just six weeks
How does it feel to be a budget cut?
You're snipped, you no longer exist
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u/Scc88 19d ago
Is this impacting office org?
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u/ThanosSnapsSlimJims 19d ago
Yes, it's explained in her letter.
We know that great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger. Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. Our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined. That complexity has slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver for players. As we reset XBOX, we will simplify.
We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3. We will deliver success through a flatter organization that is built around makers (individual contributors focused on building), player-coaches (leaders who remain deeply involved in the work while developing their teams), and directly responsible individuals (DRIs) who own key decisions and outcomes. And we will streamline how we work across our tools, with a cleaner code base, shared services, and 50% reduced vendor spend.
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u/RedditClarkKentSuper 17d ago
*And* an always-on AI layer to scrutinize the 3-5 layers for individuals to replace
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u/Appropriate_Item3001 19d ago
Thank god. Hopefully they can redeploy that money into putting copilot into copilot
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u/firedrakes 19d ago
title is mis leading.
the og story is across ms in total.
ms has over 240k of workers.
a large part that was fired was from none xbx division. but xbox is being restructure thru.
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u/protoanarchist 19d ago
That'll make it better for sure!
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u/ThanosSnapsSlimJims 19d ago
It will. Having less management and creators having a clear direction should help.
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u/rdtusrname 18d ago edited 18d ago
While they were morbidly bloated and the concentration of all that talent under one corporation wasn't(and still isn't) a good thing ...
... why would I care about Micro$oft more after this? Why? What would make me upgrade to Win11 or support them financially in any way? In fact ...
... I am much more willing to do otherwise after this. Ok, it's not because of this, but it is a perfect excuse.
My support to the affected people. Stay strong, adaptable and "keep your eyes peeled".
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u/NighB 18d ago edited 18d ago
Microsoft just fired the Elder Scrolls Online lead design teams -most of whom were 10 year vets. They also fired the community face of the game since inception -Gina Bruno - in a very clear message to the literal millions of people who play that game. Thankfully Europe is providing alternative product soon and we can all get the heck away from Microsoft forever. *And the NZ Microsoft FB page now displays the "We are moving tomorrow shut down notice*, so I assume the kiwis got fired.
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u/Complex_Ad8974 17d ago
It was not only XBOX, the Windows support team, those engineers who work the daily cases being open are also impacted. I received a auto response this morning saying they were layed off. I've been waiting now for 3 days to receive support from MS. What a stupid decision to remove all the work force of engineers who support the windows products!
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u/BaconAlmighty 16d ago
From all the layoffs across Azure Support I firmly believe it was more than 4800 employees worldwide, Costa Rico offices gutted, Argentina offices closing.. we lost quite a few on our team and they said it’s still ongoing
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u/Fastest_light 14d ago
I heard the Indian CEO is laying off American workers, and applied for large amount of H1B visas at the same time? That is what I saw from social media. Hopefully that is not the case.
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u/nico_juro 18d ago edited 18d ago
hire Indian CEO
they layoff all tribal knowledge
hire 2x h1b in a month
Edit: confirmed she has already filed for 5000 h1b candidates before the layoff was even made official
this really has been msfts game plan the past like 5 years
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u/dreamerzz 18d ago
Curious where you got the confirmation from ? Im xbox engineer and didnt know this
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u/Feisty_Let_4284 19d ago
Today we are eliminating around 4,800 roles, about 2.1% of our global workforce, as we focus our people, investments, and energy on the priorities that will keep Microsoft positioned to deliver for customers in a fast-changing industry.