Microsoft lays off 6,000 employees

• "We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace," the spokesperson said.
• Microsoft did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment.

State of play: It's the company's second round of layoffs this year.

• Microsoft reported employing 228,000 as of June 2024, the last time it made its staff numbers public.
• The most recent cuts represent Microsoft's largest round of layoffs since slashing 10,000 roles in 2023.
• The company cut about 1% of its staff in January, performance-based layoffs, the company said at the time. This most recent round was not performance-based, the spokesperson said.

Catch up quick: Despite broader economic uncertainty, Microsoft actually beat earnings expectations in its first quarter this year.

• Microsoft posted quarterly revenue of $70.1 billion, up 13% from a year ago, and net income of $25.8 billion, up 18%. Both figures beat S&P Capital IQ analyst expectations.
• Revenue in the company's server products and cloud services segment soared 22% as the company's Azure service grows in popularity.

• Overall revenue in the "intelligent cloud" segment was up 21%.

Despite that, Microsoft has been under pressure to keep costs down.

• The company is on track to invest about $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI.
• That's true of the broader tech landscape as well – Meta announced performance-based layoffs of about 5% in January and Salesforce said it would be laying off about 1,000 employees as it redoubles its AI efforts.