In response to the recent layoffs of 9000 employees, Executive VP of Cloud + AI Scott Guthrie said “our Azure compute back end didn’t even flinch, and CPU usage never got above 10%.” In an interview with RedmondMag, he went on to say that “this proves our Azure data centers can support firings at massive scale.” When prompted for further numbers, Guthrie expanded, saying “our initial load testing showed we could support, two, maybe three thousand RIFs a week, but we quadrupled that and lots of headroom to spare. I think it’s safe to say that other large companies could terminate between twenty to forty thousand associates per week and not even break a sweat on our platform.” Then chuckling, he said, “Actually, our free drink refrigerators in the office consumed more power than our HR SQL Azure databases did during the week.”
CEO Satya Nadella credits the hard work of Guthrie’s scalability team (half of which was let go), and also the AI chatbots that were built to offload terminated employee’s questions. “Our generative AI agents really took the burden off of our HR staff, freeing them up to do more impactful work, like planning the next round of layoffs.”