Microsoft has laid off hundreds of employees across its many branches, the Xbox division among them, per a report published late Monday night by Insider.
The cuts reportedly affect fewer than 1,000 employees but are spread across several divisions of the company. Affected areas include the research and development-focused Strategic Missions and Technology organization, the war gaming simulation department Studio Alpha, the office of the Chief Technology Officer, the Mission Engineering department and the Mission Expansion cloud government team.
"Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities on a regular basis, and make structural adjustments accordingly," a Microsoft spokesperson told Insider. "We will continue to invest in our business and hire in key growth areas in the year ahead."
In an email to team members viewed by Insider, Mission Engineering head Zach Kramer said the group would be "deprioritizing work already underway."
"This is hard to do," he continued. "There are lots of ideas that could potentially have an impact and each of us has worked very hard, but we must make tradeoffs as resources are not unlimited and time is the scarcest of them all."
Kramer did not explicitly mention layoffs.
Ahead of Monday's layoffs, Microsoft significantly slowed hiring in anticipation of a possible recession. Microsoft announced in July it aimed to lay off less than 1% of its 180,000-person workforce, but it's unclear if this round of layoffs is included in that figure. The exact number of layoffs has yet to be confirmed.
Microsoft is currently in the process of acquiring Activision Blizzard for a record-breaking $68.7 billion. Brazilian regulators approved the deal earlier this month, but their counterparts in the U.K. and the U.S. have intimated a more rigorous examination of the deal is likely.
This article was originally published on dbltap as Microsoft Lays Off Nearly 1,000 Employees, Including at Xbox.
