MICROSOFT ASKS 60,000 EMPLOYEES TO PLEASE FIRE THEMSELVES BY DECEMBER 31

Microsoft spent Monday emailing roughly 60,000 employees something called the Voluntary Exit Offer, which is corporate for please leave on purpose. It went to workers in the US, Canada, India and the UK at experience level 70 and below, vice president on down, about 27% of a 223,000-person workforce. You have until early December to decide, and if you say yes your last day is December 31. Nothing kicks off a new year like a severance check and a dead badge. The terms are similar to Microsoft's standard severance. No sweetener, no bonus for raising your hand. Chief people officer Amy Coleman's memo called it "more ways for employees to shape their next chapter", a chapter that opens with career planning resources and a company laptop you have to mail back. Now look at who got left off the list. Bloomberg reported the participating divisions include Xbox, Windows, Copilot and Finance, while data center, sales and marketing staff are excluded. So Microsoft will thin out the humans making the AI products and leave the crews keeping the chips cold alone. This follows this spring's first-ever voluntary retirement program, open to about 7% of US employees, which Microsoft said in July more than 30% of eligible workers took, plus a July layoff round of 4,800 that fell hard on Xbox. Axios counts roughly 15,000 cut earlier this year on top of that.

Why you should give a shit: Data center staff are among the groups Microsoft would not let walk, which tells you which part of the Copilot business it considers load-bearing, and it isn't the part with a pulse.