Microsoft is giving roughly 60,000 employees the option to leave the company with a severance package, according to Business Insider. The Microsoft voluntary exit offer covers about a quarter of the company’s total workforce, which makes it one of the largest buyout programs the tech giant has run.
The move is part of a wider cost-cutting push. Instead of choosing who goes, Microsoft is letting a large share of its staff decide for themselves whether to take the deal and walk away.
What the memo says
Chief People Officer Amy Coleman announced the program in a memo to staff. She described it as an experiment for the company: “The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it.”
Coleman also framed the buyouts as one tool among several. “At the same time, we’ll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills, and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft,” she wrote. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee.”
The memo stops short of naming specific teams. As a result, it is still unclear which divisions and departments can apply, or how the severance terms compare to a standard layoff package.
Where Xbox fits into the Microsoft voluntary exit offer
For the games industry, the open question is whether Xbox staff are eligible. The gaming division has gone through several rounds of layoffs in recent years, and those cuts have hit studios and support teams alike.
Xbox is also in the middle of what it calls a “reset.” As part of that plan, the division set a goal of 3,200 layoffs through June 2027. If Xbox employees can take the buyout, some of those reductions could come from people who leave by choice rather than through forced cuts.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has not said whether people who accept the deal count toward that Xbox target. The company has also not given a deadline for employees to decide.
The second buyout program this year
This is not the first time in 2026 that Microsoft has asked staff to leave on their own terms. In the spring, the company launched a Voluntary Retirement Program aimed at long-serving employees.
That earlier plan let veteran staff collect their severance packages early, along with certain vested stock options. Microsoft extended it to 9,000 employees, and about a third of them accepted, according to Business Insider. That works out to roughly 3,000 departures from a single program.
However, the new Microsoft voluntary exit offer is far larger in scope. It reaches more than six times as many people as the retirement program, and it is not limited to employees near the end of their careers.
Taken together, the Microsoft voluntary exit offer and the spring retirement program show Microsoft leaning on voluntary departures to reduce headcount in 2026. The company still has not said how many acceptances it expects from the new offer, or what it plans to do if too few employees sign up.