Comment by NoPicklez

Companies the size of Microsoft of which have 200,000+ employees can reshuffle and sack 5% of their workforce in order to provide capacity for future areas or allow them to be ready to make large investments in different areas.

It is likely that Microsoft had staff working in areas that no longer required the attention they once did.

I want people in jobs too and I am currently going through an unseen reshuffle that is through no fault of my own. But layoffs occur for all sorts of reasons, many of which are not to reduce further acquisitions or hires.

If I was an employee who was laid off, I might justify it given that AI and those employees from OpenAI have become an acquirable gold mine all of a sudden.