Bill Gates may be the iconic face of Microsoft (MSFT), but he isn’t solely responsible for the company’s groundbreaking achievements — those were driven by a global team of highly skilled and dedicated workers.
The original Windows 1.0 team, for instance, was a small and scrappy group of 20-something developers who, in 1983, built the platform out of Microsoft’s Bellevue, Washington, office, often staying up all night and figuring things out as they went along.
These workers reunited in 2025 for a 40-year reunion, joined by Microsoft’s former CEO and Windows 1.0 project leader, Steve Ballmer, but the reunion itself was only made possible by a hidden Easter egg the team had embedded in the software — an internal credits list that took decades to uncover.
Engineers and developers have always been a core part of Microsoft’s business, but as the company has evolved, their roles have pivoted. Programmers started out coding in Visual Basic and C++ during the MS-DOS and Windows era, only to take on greater engineering functions as the company developed its Azure hybrid cloud technology.
Today, Microsoft’s employees focus on building, training, and overseeing AI models — rather than writing code themselves.
In fact, despite its massive workforce, Microsoft has invested heavily in AI infrastructure while trimming costs to offset its spending, leading to big layoffs in 2025.
So, just how many employees does Microsoft have now?
How many employees does Microsoft have in 2026?
According to the company’s 2025 Annual Report, Microsoft employs 228,000 full-time workers.
Here’s how the employees break down:
- 125,000 are US workers
- 103,000 are international workers
Their job functions range from operations (89,000), including product support, manufacturing, and distribution roles, to research and development positions (80,000), sales and marketing jobs (44,000), and administration (15,000), which includes HR, finance, and legal positions.
Related: History of Microsoft: Company timeline & facts
Where are Microsoft’s employees located?
Microsoft has offices in over 100 countries around the world, but the majority of its workers are located in the United States, China, India, and Europe.
The company’s headquarters is in Redmond, Washington (it moved from Bellevue in 1986), and its Redmond campus remains its beating heart, a hub for its engineers, product teams, and executives.
Microsoft also has a large footprint in India, with engineering teams in Hyderabad and a Bangalore base for cloud and AI development.
However, its sales, marketing, and customer service divisions are housed in the United States.
Related: Microsoft’s logo over the years: A timeline of innovation
Has Microsoft had layoffs recently?
Yes. While AI has not replaced Microsoft’s human workforce, according to Yahoo! Finance, the sheer cost of building AI systems led Microsoft to make significant workforce cuts in 2025.
The publication reported that MSFT spent $88 billion on AI in fiscal year 2025, and it also slashed 15,000 jobs. In July alone, the company laid off 9,000 workers.
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Yahoo! Finance highlighted a memo by Xbox chief Phil Spencer, detailing how the “necessary” cuts would “increase agility and effectiveness.”
Despite reporting record performance in 2025, with revenues up 15% from 2024 to $281.7 billion and operating income of $128.5 billion, representing a 17% increase, Microsoft has been streamlining its workforce to offset its AI investments.
100 percent made up / speculative / wrong.
— Frank X. Shaw (@fxshaw) January 7, 2026
Speculation on further layoffs in 2026 persists on message boards like Reddit, but so far, nothing has materialized. A January 2026 article by The Seattle Times quotes Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Chief Communications Officer, who responded to the rumors on X by saying that they were “100 percent made up / speculative / wrong.”
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