Microsoft cut about 4,800 jobs on July 6, roughly 2 percent of its workforce.
Xbox is taking the hardest hit: about 3,200 roles through mid-2027, around 20 percent of the division, including 1,600 immediately and 268 more in September.
Double Fine, Compulsion, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs are leaving; the next Halo game is moving to Activision.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called it a reset, writing that platform teams were 40 percent larger even as players and playtime fell.
Satya Nadella later called the cuts “great to see.”
Critics said the jobs were being swapped for H-1B workers. On July 10, Microsoft communications chief Frank X. Shaw said the cuts were to fix an unhealthy Xbox business, “not… to replace employees with foreign workers.”
He said the visa figures were company-wide renewals and applications, not Xbox-specific, that most cut roles were not American, and that Sharma was born, raised, and educated in Wisconsin.
She was born in Racine in 1989. No public filing shows the Xbox jobs were backfilled one-for-one.
On October 8, Vice President JD Vance suspended Microsoft from the PERM green-card program, along with
Adobe,
Cognizant,
Infosys,
Tata,
Wipro,
HCL, and
Capgemini.
He said Microsoft laid off about 6,000 American workers last year while getting about 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards, and that it replaced each laid-off worker with “one and a half foreign indentured servants.”
Those are company-wide administration figures, not an Xbox count.
Microsoft had not immediately responded.
Across the H-1B program in FY 2025, about 70 percent of approvals were for people born in India and 12 percent in China.
Microsoft itself had 1,394 new and 4,863 continuing approvals that year.
