Microsoft Opens Voluntary Exit to 60,000 Staff as Tech Giants Rewrite the Layoff Playbook

More than 60,000 Microsoft employees — roughly 27% of a global workforce of about 223,000 as of the end of June 2026 — were offered a voluntary severance route when the company unveiled the programme in late October 2026. The offer covered staff in the US, Canada, India and the UK, reaching up the hierarchy as far as vice-presidents. Windows, Xbox, Copilot and the finance division were fully included; data centres, cybersecurity, sales, marketing and quantum computing were only partly covered. Germany and Austria were left out entirely.

The move fits a wider pattern across the sector. Industry analysis from early November 2026 shows Google, Microsoft and Meta increasingly leaning on severance packages and voluntary exit offers when they restructure. Such deals frequently go beyond simply continuing base salaries.

A sector shedding jobs by the hundred thousand

Figures compiled by the industry tracker TrueUp put layoffs in the technology sector at more than 200,000 people in 2026, after roughly 245,000 positions disappeared across the whole of 2025.

Google laid the groundwork for the current wave as early as 2025, running exit programmes in selected teams in the US and the UK. Later initiatives followed the same template but targeted specific departments.

At its Zurich site, which employs around 5,000 people, the company announced such an offer in mid-June with a response deadline of mid-July; the first departures took effect from August 2026. The package provided one month's salary per year of service, capped at twelve months' pay, with the DeepMind research unit excluded. At least four people in a Swiss team of about 50 accepted. In at least one division, redundancies followed the offers anyway. Google had already cut more than 200 staff in Switzerland in 2023.

Earlier, more than 4,500 Google employees signed a petition calling for severance offers to be made before compulsory layoffs. What terms apply in Germany was not reported; for comparison, Paragraph 1a of the German Dismissal Protection Act (KSchG) sets a standard severance of 0.5 months' earnings per year of service.

How the packages stack up

Analysis by Challenger, Gray & Christmas and Simple Severance puts the industry baseline for severance at 16 weeks. Several companies depart from that standard:

• Meta: With a global workforce of around 66,000, its exit model comprises 2.15 months' salary per year of service plus up to ten months of paid leave at 80% of gross salary, alongside founder and career coaching. Back in 2023, 88 of roughly 350 staff in France had accepted a comparable offer.
• Canva: In November 2026 layoffs affecting 22% of the workforce, or about 1,271 people according to HR Brew, those affected received at least six months' base salary. The one-year waiting period on stock options was also waived, work laptops could be kept, and a founder grant of US$10,000 plus subsidies for health insurance and networking services were provided.
• Block: After a February 2026 programme offering 20 weeks' pay, an extra week per year of service and US$5,000 in transition money, the company adjusted its terms in November 2026. Those affected received seven weeks' base salary plus one week per year of service and 30 days of paid leave.

Infrastructure spending climbs even as headcount is reshaped

The staffing overhaul is unfolding against a backdrop of massive investment in data centres and servers. At Google parent Alphabet, capital expenditure in the first nine months of 2026 rose to €114.8 billion (US$131.95 billion), compared with €55.3 billion in the same period a year earlier.

Despite a headcount of 204,757 at the end of September 2026 — 14,590 more than a year before — the group reported negative free cash flow of around US$9 billion in the third quarter of 2026, on capital expenditure of US$51.4 billion. Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi has said Alphabet plans up to US$205 billion of investment in data centres for 2026, with a further increase in prospect for 2027.