Microsoft Lays Off 150 Cloud Sales Specialists

Microsoft last week laid off around 150 employees from a team tasked with convincing medium-size companies to adopt cloud services such as Azure server rentals and Microsoft 365 productivity apps, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The cuts to that team, known as digital cloud acquisition, indicate that the plan hasn’t gone as well as Microsoft expected, while the company experienced a sharp sales slowdown in recent quarters. The move is part of a broader layoff of 4.5% of the company’s approximately 220,000 employees that has impacted subsidiaries including LinkedIn and GitHub as well as relatively newer teams, such as the industrial metaverse product group, and sales specialists who didn’t directly generate revenue.