Microsoft offers buyouts to around 60,000 employees
Around 60,000 employees are eligible for Microsoft's voluntary exit offer. What is known about payouts, deadlines and the company's AI spending.
On October 26, 2026, Microsoft offered some employees severance in exchange for leaving voluntarily. Around 60,000 people are eligible, the company confirmed to GeekWire. How many will accept is not yet known.
Who can take the offer
The program covers participating teams in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and India. Employees at internal level 70 and below are eligible, including some vice presidents. Business leaders decide whether their teams participate; some engineering groups are not participating.
Base payments depend on tenure and job level. Employees receive their individual terms by email; Microsoft has not announced a single payout amount for everyone. The company also promises career-planning support. There are no age or tenure thresholds for eligibility, and performance is not a selection criterion.
According to CNBC, employees must decide in early December, and those who accept will leave on December 31. Those dates came from a person familiar with the program; they do not appear in Microsoft's public memo.
Buyouts do not rule out further layoffs
In July, Microsoft announced plans to cut around 4,800 jobs. The company has now told GeekWire that voluntary exits do not replace layoffs, which remain an option depending on business conditions.
$45.2 billion in quarterly capital spending
For the quarter ended in September, Microsoft's capital expenditures totaled $45.2 billion, including finance leases. Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood reported the figure on the October 28 earnings call. Roughly three-quarters went toward CPUs, GPUs and other relatively short-lived assets โ hardware used, among other things, to run AI applications. This is Microsoft's total capital spending, not a separate AI budget.
The company remains profitable. For the same quarter, it reported revenue of $92.3 billion and operating income of $45.9 billion. GeekWire places the buyout offer in the context of investor pressure to control operating expenses as Microsoft invests heavily in data centers and AI.
Microsoft's public memo does not say that AI will replace the employees who leave.