Irish jobs at Microsoft and Linkedin at risk as tech giant announces cuts

The global business employs around 4,000 people in Ireland, mostly at Microsoft itself, with around 2,000 at Linkedin. Both businesses have their European headquarters in Ireland. Linkedin only recently moved into a new Irish campus in the swish Wilton Park office development in Dublin this year.

A cut of 3pc to the Irish headcount would add up to around 180 jobs.

A spokesperson declined to say how many Irish jobs are at risk or what roles could be affected, but confirmed a large scale restructuring of the business is underway.

“We continue to implement organisational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” the company said.

The focus on job losses is understood to be middle managers and staff working on products and projects away from the developing fields of AI. Engineers focused on AI related work are understood to be the least vulnerable roles.

In Ireland, redundancies on the scale being considered for the group as a whole trigger a mandatory consultation process with employees’ representatives for at least 30 days, as well as a requirement to notify the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

That means there is likely to be a lag between termination notices being issued in the US in particualr, where worker protections are weaker, and here.

Globally, Microsoft had a staff of 228,000 full-time workers as of last June, when it published its annual headcount. More than half are based in the US. In Ireland both Microsoft and corporate networking platform Linkedin have large scale campuses in Dublin. If fully implemented the 3pc jobs cut will be Microsoft’s biggest since early 2023, when it laid off 10,000 workers – almost 5pc of the then workforce having scaled up hiring during the pandemic.

Just last year Microsoft announced a big expansion in Dublin, with plans to add 550 engineering and research and development jobs.

However, the pace of change in the tech industry as it moves to integrate increasingly rapid and advanced AI developments is changing both the products being created by companies like Microsoft and their own internal structures.

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