Source: THE AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

Mi­crosoft is fir­ing thou­sands of work­ers, its sec­ond mass lay­off in months.

The tech gi­ant be­gan send­ing out lay­off no­tices Wednes­day.

The com­pa­ny de­clined to say how many peo­ple would be laid off but said that it will com­prise less than 4% of the work­force it had a year ago.

Mi­crosoft said the cuts will af­fect mul­ti­ple teams around the world, in­clud­ing its sales di­vi­sion and its Xbox video game busi­ness.

“We con­tin­ue to im­ple­ment or­ga­ni­za­tion­al changes nec­es­sary to best po­si­tion the com­pa­ny and teams for suc­cess in a dy­nam­ic mar­ket­place,” it said in a state­ment.

Mi­crosoft em­ployed 228,000 full-time work­ers as of last June, the last time it re­port­ed its an­nu­al head­count. The com­pa­ny said Wednes­day that its lat­est lay­offs would cut close to 4% of that work­force, which would be about 9,000 peo­ple. But it has al­ready had at least three lay­offs this year.

Un­til now, at least, the biggest was in May, when Mi­crosoft be­gan lay­ing off about 6,000 work­ers, near­ly 3% of its glob­al work­force and its largest job cuts in more than two years as the com­pa­ny spent heav­i­ly on ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence.

Mi­crosoft al­so cut an­oth­er 300 work­ers based out of its Red­mond, Wash­ing­ton head­quar­ters in June, on top of near­ly 2,000 who lost their jobs in the Puget Sound re­gion in May, ac­cord­ing to no­tices it sent to Wash­ing­ton state em­ploy­ment of­fi­cials.

The May lay­offs were heav­i­ly fo­cused on peo­ple in soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing and prod­uct man­age­ment roles. —RED­MOND, Wash. (AP)