Microsoft to slash 2100 jobs, closes R&D lab in Silicon Valley

As part of the company's previously announced restructuring plan, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed 2,100 workers have been notified that they will be losing their job. This bring the total number of job cuts at Microsoft to 15,100 of the planned 18,000.

The layoffs reportedly include 747 employees working in and near Microsoft's hometown of Redmond, as well as an undisclosed number of cuts at Microsoft's Fargo, North Dakota campus, which works on Dynamics ERP, among other projects.

Throughout the process, Nadella has maintained that most of the cuts will come from Microsoft's new devices and services business, which it bought from Nokia in April. Professional positions and manufacturing jobs in Nokia's factories around the world will be eliminated, he said. But that still leaves thousands of jobs to be lost across Microsoft's business in the US and elsewhere, and Thursday's layoffs reportedly included 747 employees in the Puget Sound region of Washington, which includes Seattle, Bellevue, and Microsoft's hometown of Redmond.

Surprisingly, ZD Net's Mary Jo Foley points out that Microsoft will also be closing its Microsoft Research (MSR) Silicon Valley lab. This R&D facility employs around 50 and is located in Mountain View, California.

The MSR Silicon Valley lab is primarily focused on distributed computing research, including "privacy, security, protocols, fault-tolerance, large-scale systems, concurrency, computer architecture, Internet search and services, and related theory," according to the web page for the lab.

Microsoft explains the closing of the Silicon Valley lab is part of a "consolidation of the firm's west coast labs".