Re:Ask HN: Microsoft/Azure Outage?
by NichoPaolucci on Thursday November 12, 2026 @01:51PM
(#50472253)
Yeah - I get it. Just poking the bear a bit. We've had some major incidents this year from multiple vendors, it has been aggravating.
Re:Ask HN: Microsoft/Azure Outage?
by AnimalMuppet on Thursday November 12, 2026 @02:04PM
(#50472479)
Hmm. More than normal?
And everybody has spent a year letting AI write code. Correlation is not causation, but I wonder...
Why do they offer these buy outs at all, doesn't the US have at will employment?
Or is this just a gesture of goodwill to avoid people jumping the ship on their own?
At will applies on a one by one basis - at a certain headcount, WARN legislation applies https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn
And the other part is the "goodwill" you mention - if you jettison people for nothin en masse, word gets out, and make it hard to hire in the future
A layoff of any real size has negative impacts to their unemployment insurance premiums and restricts their ability to file PERM for employees. Meeting those targets with voluntary separation prevents those impacts.
If you lay people off, you’re on the hook for their unemployment. A voluntary buyout avoids that, and also avoids mandatory reporting for layoffs.
Re:Ask HN: Microsoft/Azure Outage?
by StableAlkyne on Thursday November 12, 2026 @02:13PM
(#50472622)
Voluntary reductions do not have the same reporting requirements or projections that actual layoffs have.
Re:Ask HN: Microsoft/Azure Outage?
by NotMichaelBay on Thursday November 12, 2026 @02:14PM
(#50472643)
I think both parties probably benefit; people who are more likely to take the offer are those who have another reason to leave (unfulfilled, etc). This will benefit the company in the long run because they can eventually replace them with someone who want to join (people applying for the job).
Just clarifying this in general, when a company makes a voluntary offer to some segment of employees, especially at this size, it is a statistics game of how many people accept the buy out.
They did not make the offer to 25% of the employees to downsize by 25%, they did it to downsize by 5% (or something like that), and then made the offer based on how many they expect to accept. This is specifically covered in this line of the geekwire article:
> Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
They probably expect 10-20% of those offered to take it, which would result in a 2.5-5% total downsizing.