The new announcement from Microsoft affects 5 percent of the company's employees.

It is therefore significantly more noticeable than the staff reductions that Microsoft made during the past year, where less than 1 percent were affected.

- During the pandemic, there was a rapid acceleration.

Now I think we are going through a phase where there is a certain normalization on the demand side, said the company's CEO Satya Nadella at the World Economic Forum in Davos, shortly before the announcement was made public.

Amazon is also notifying

The announcement comes ahead of Microsoft's interim report next week, where the group is expected to report a sales increase of 2 percent for the broken fiscal year's second quarter.

That would be the lowest growth rate for Microsoft since 2017.

Amazon, Microsoft's competitor in cloud services, has notified 18,000 employees of layoffs, which comes after big cuts this fall at companies such as Facebook owner Meta and social network Twitter.