The Last Brain Cell

A comic about everyday absurdity Where's the logic?

Two Weeks Later

Two-panel comic. Panel one: a tired man with messy hair and a black cat sit at a desk with a Microsoft mug, watching a screen that reads 'Breaking News: Microsoft cuts 5,000+ jobs in 2026. Voluntary exit packages offered to 60,000 employees. Profits up 31% to $133.7B.' Panel two, captioned 'Two weeks later': the man stares open-mouthed at the screen, which now reads 'Breaking News: Major Microsoft outage. Services disrupted worldwide', with Microsoft 365, Teams, Outlook and Azure all marked offline. The cat looks unimpressed.

The facts behind it

  • In July, Microsoft announced 4,800 layoffs, months after launching its first-ever voluntary retirement programme in April. CNBC
  • Microsoft closed its 2026 financial year with net income of $133.7 billion, up 31% on the year before. Fortune
  • Another 268 Xbox roles were cut, taking Microsoft's announced 2026 layoffs past 5,000. IBTimes UK
  • Microsoft offered voluntary exit packages to about 60,000 employees in the US, Canada, India and the UK, roughly 27% of its 223,000-person workforce. CNBC · GeekWire
  • Two days after the exit offer, Microsoft reported record quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion (up 19%) and net income of $36.6 billion (up 32%). Microsoft
  • Seventeen days after the exit offer, a global outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot. Downdetector logged reports from 74 countries and territories within about an hour. Al Jazeera · CNN
  • Microsoft said servers became "unexpectedly unavailable" and ruled out a cyberattack. It hasn't published a root cause, and it hasn't linked the outage to its job cuts. Al Jazeera

Artistic licence: the exit offer and the outage were 17 days apart rather than two weeks, and we couldn't confirm that Azure went down. Microsoft's incident covered its Microsoft 365 services.

#tech #layoffs #microsoft #outage