Cheddar RSS

Microsoft began laying off about 6,000 workers Tuesday, nearly 3% of its entire workforce and its largest job cuts in more than two years as the company spends heavily on artificial intelligence.

Hard hit was the tech giant’s home state of Washington, where Microsoft informed state officials it was cutting 1,985 workers tied to its Redmond headquarters, many of them in software engineering and product management roles.

Microsoft said the layoffs will be across all levels, teams and geographies but the cuts will focus on reducing the number of managers. Notices to employees began going out on Tuesday.

The mass layoffs come just weeks after Microsoft reported strong sales and profits that beat Wall Street expectations for the January-March quarter, which investors took as a dose of relief during a turbulent time for the tech sector and U.S. economy.

“I think many people have this conception of layoffs as something that struggling companies have to do to save themselves, which is one reason for layoffs but it’s not the only reason,” said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at workplace reviews site Glassdoor. “Big tech companies have trimmed their workforces as they rearrange their strategies and pull back from the more aggressive hiring that they did during the early post-pandemic years.”

Microsoft employed 228,000 full-time workers as of last June, the last time it reported its annual headcount. About 55% of those workers were in the U.S.

Microsoft announced a smaller round of performance-based layoffs in January. But the 3% cuts will be Microsoft’s biggest since early 2023, when the company cut 10,000 workers, almost 5% of its workforce, joining other tech companies that were scaling back their pandemic-era expansions.

Microsoft’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, said on an April earnings call that the company was focused on “building high-performing teams and increasing our agility by reducing layers with fewer managers.” She also said the headcount in March was 2% higher than a year earlier, and down slightly compared to the end of last year.

The layoffs are hitting all parts of Microsoft’s business, including the video game platform Xbox and the career networking site LinkedIn. Some laid-off workers and the executives who made the cuts took to LinkedIn to talk about them.

“This is the first time I’ve had to lay people off to support business goals that aren’t my own,” wrote Scott Hanselman, a vice president of Microsoft’s developer community. “I often have trouble separating my beliefs with the system that I participate in and am complicit in. These are people with dreams and rent and I love them and I want them to be OK.”

He added: “This is a day with a lot of tears.”

The company didn’t give a specific reason for the layoffs, only that they were part of “organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.”

Microsoft has said it has been spending $80 billion in the fiscal year that ends in June on building data centers and other infrastructure it needs to develop its artificial intelligence technology, though it has also scaled back some of those projects. Those AI tools have been pitched as changing the way people work, including in Microsoft’s own workplaces.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an AI event last month at Meta’s headquarters that “maybe 20, 30% of the code” for some of Microsoft’s coding projects “are probably all written by software.”

Even if AI is increasingly helping Microsoft software engineers, however, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a chief reason for laying them off.

“When these big tech companies say that they’re trimming management layers, that doesn’t really sound like it’s being driven by AI,” Zhao said. “You’re not expecting ChatGPT to replace the manager.”

Instead, cutting management ranks can often reflect a broader strategy.

“As companies grow quickly, you need to add managers who can coordinate across teams or within teams,” Zhao said. “But it’s not until things start to slow down that people start asking questions about how necessary those roles are.”

Of the laid-off employees in Washington, about 1,500 worked in person at Microsoft’s offices and 475 worked remotely, according to the notice the company sent to the state employment agency. Their official last day will be in July.

After hiring sprees that started when the COVID-19 pandemic spiked demand for online services, many tech companies are still in a process of “coming back to Earth and trying to kind of rebalance some things,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed, the job listings website.

And while Microsoft isn’t as directly affected by President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs as some of its peers, it must also think more broadly about economic conditions that could play out over the coming months and years.

“This could be an effort to think more long term,” Stahle said. “If you have to go out and buy groceries and spend more on groceries and produce that are more expensive due to tariffs, you maybe don’t have as much discretionary income to spend on electronics or video game systems.”

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A British Bank of America analyst has been sentenced to a decade in a Saudi Arabian prison apparently over a since-deleted social media post, according to his lawyer.

The family of Ahmed al-Doush, 41, believes the charges against him stemmed from a deleted 2018 tweet about Sudan that did not mention Saudi Arabia and his relationship with the son of a Saudi critic in exile, Amnesty International said in a statement Tuesday.

The father-of-four was sentenced Monday after being accused of violating terrorism and anti-cyber crime laws.

“The exact tweet is unknown,” Haydee Dijkstal, al-Doush’s international counsel, posted Tuesday on X. “His trial and detention involved fair trial and due process violations.” The lawyer said the U.K. government ”should stand firmly against a British national’s imprisonment for allegedly exercising his free speech rights.”

The Saudi Arabian government did not respond to requests for comment.

“We are supporting a British man who is detained in Saudi Arabia and are in contact with his family and local authorities,” a spokesperson for the Foreign Office in London said in a statement.

Al-Doush, a British national, was arrested in August 2024 at a Riyadh airport where he was waiting for a flight to Manchester, England, with his family following a holiday. His wife has since given birth to their fourth child.

“I rarely speak to my husband, but in the few snatched conversations we have managed, it is clear that Ahmed is struggling,” al-Doush’s wife, Amaher Nour, said ahead of her husband’s sentencing, citing his thyroid problems and distress after nine months of detention.

The developments came while U.S. President Donald Trump was in Saudi Arabia, where several dual nationals with Western ties and Saudis have been detained in recent years over social media posts that could be viewed as critical to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler.

In 2021, a Saudi-American dual national was sentenced to more than 19 years in prison by Saudi Arabia on terrorism-related charges stemming from tweets.

Saad Almadi, now 75, was jailed in connection with tweets he had posted over the past several years in the U.S. He was released in 2023 but has been banned from leaving the kingdom.

On Wednesday, the kingdom’s foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud was asked during a press conference if Almadi’s case had been discussed during Trump’s trip.

“We obviously have robust conversations with our U.S. partners about a number of issues,” Prince Faisal said, without directly commenting on Almadi. He added that Saudi Arabia “will always, you know, welcome those conversations.”

Associated Press writer Baraa Anwer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report

More than 1,000 Starbucks baristas at 75 U.S. stores have gone on strike since Sunday to protest a new company dress code, a union representing the coffee giant’s workers said Wednesday.

Starbucks put new limits starting Monday on what its baristas can wear under their green aprons. The dress code requires employees at company-operated and licensed stores in the U.S. and Canada to wear a solid black shirt and khaki, black or blue denim bottoms.

Under the previous dress code, baristas could wear a broader range of dark colors and patterned shirts. Starbucks said the new rules would make its green aprons stand out and create a sense of familiarity for customers as it tries to establish a warmer, more welcoming feeling in its stores.

But Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents workers at 570 of Starbucks’ 10,000 company-owned U.S. stores, said the dress code should be subject to collective bargaining.

“Starbucks has lost its way. Instead of listening to baristas who make the Starbucks experience what it is, they are focused on all the wrong things, like implementing a restrictive new dress code,” said Paige Summers, a Starbucks shift supervisor from Hanover, Maryland. “Customers don’t care what color our clothes are when they’re waiting 30 minutes for a latte.”

Summers and others also criticized the company for selling styles of Starbucks-branded clothing that employees no longer are allowed to wear to work on an internal website. Starbucks said it would give two free black T-shirts to each employee when it announced the new dress code.

Starbucks said Wednesday that the strike was having a limited impact on its 10,000 company-operated U.S. stores.

“Thousands of Starbucks partners came to work this week ready to serve their customers and communities,” the company said in a statement. “It would be more productive if the union would put the same effort into coming back to the table to finalize a reasonable contract.”

Starbucks Workers United has been unionizing U.S. stores since 2021. Starbucks and the union have yet to reach a contract agreement, despite agreeing to return to the bargaining table in February 2024.

The union said this week that it filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging Starbucks’ failure to bargain over the new dress code.

Go Fund Yourself is the ultimate interactive TV show where entertainment meets opportunity. While you watch top CEO’s present innovative, promising startups to our panel of TITANS – YOU can actually invest in these companies in REAL-TIME — all from the comfort of your home.

U.S. retail egg prices fell in April from the record-high prices they hit earlier this year, according to government data released Tuesday.

The average price for a dozen Grade A eggs dropped 12.7% to $5.12 in April, according to the Consumer Price Index. It was the first month-to-month decline in egg prices since October 2024.

Still, egg prices remain near historic highs as a persistent outbreak of bird flu continues to wipe out flocks of egg-laying hens. The April figure is 79% higher than the same month a year earlier, when the price averaged $2.86 per dozen.

In March, U.S. egg prices had climbed to a record $6.23 per dozen. It was unclear how much egg prices would fall in April because consumer demand is usually high around Easter and Passover.

Bird flu has killed more than 169 million birds since early 2022. Any time a bird gets sick, the entire flock is killed to help keep bird flu from spreading. That can have an effect on the egg supply because massive egg farms may have millions of birds.

In April, outbreaks on two farms on Ohio and South Dakota affected more than 927,000 egg-laying hens.