Shares of the Redmond, Washington-based company closed down 2 percent on Wednesday.
The announcement coincides with the start of layoffs at its retail and cloud-computing rival Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O, which began notifying employees on Wednesday of job cuts of its own 18,000 people.
In an internal memo seen by Reuters, Amazon said affected workers in the United States, Canada and Costa Rica would be notified by the end of the day. Employees in China will be notified after Chinese New Year.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc META.O has announced 11,000 job cuts, while cloud-based software company Salesforce Inc CRM.N said it would cut 10 percent of its 80,000-member workforce.
Overall, more than 97,000 job cuts are expected to be announced in tech in 2022, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the most for the sector since 2002, when 131,000 cuts were announced .
“We haven’t seen this activity since the dot-com crash,” said Andrew Challenger, the company’s senior vice president.
Microsoft is terminating 878 full-time employees at its Redmond headquarters, according to an update on Washington State’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications (WARN) page. Under US law, most employers are required to report staff reductions affecting 50 or more workers at a single location.