Microsoft Corp is considering a reduction of approximately 5 percent of its staff, or approximately 11,000 positions.

The corporation intends to reduce the number of engineering divisions through new waves of layoffs.

This brings Microsoft in line with other computer titans that have announced layoffs in response to sluggish demand and a failing economy.

Earlier in the month of October, it was claimed that Microsoft laid off less than 1,000 people across multiple organisations. These layoffs affected fewer than 1 percent of the software titan’s more than 200,000 employees. The company announced in July that a limited number of positions had been removed and that its workforce will expand in the future.

According to records, the corporation employed 221,000 full-time employees as of June 30, including 122,000 in the United States and 99,000 worldwide.

According to Reuters, the business is under pressure to sustain growth rates at its cloud arm Azure after multiple quarters of decline in the personal computer market negatively impacted sales of Windows and devices.

Microsoft will release quarterly results on January 24.

Thousands of information professionals began the new year on a gloomy note as a result of global layoffs. In less than a week of the year 2023, more than 30,000 workers worldwide had lost their employment. Interestingly, this is roughly double the total amount of individuals laid off in December 2022. In the first six days of January, a total of 30,611 individuals from 30 organisations were laid off, according to data from Layoffs Tracker. In addition to Amazon, the list includes the video hosting service Vimeo, the IT giant Salesforce, and the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi.

A substantial amount of this statistic is attributable to Amazon.com Inc’s decision to eliminate over 18,000 positions as part of a personnel reduction. The firm owned by Jeff Bezos has already eclipsed the 11,000 layoffs disclosed by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. last year.