Microsoft-owned GitHub fires 142 people in India; lays off all tech team

Microsoft-owned GitHub has become the latest tech company to fire employees, with it laying off its entire engineering team in India.

GitHub laid off 142 people in India, including the entire staff in its engineering division, people aware of the development said on Tuesday.

Those affected by the decision were deployed across the company’s offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi.

Also read: Lay-offs continue: Accenture to slash 19,000 jobs next

Reorganisation plan

When contacted, a GitHub spokesperson said the decision was part of the company’s reorganisation plan.

“As part of the reorganisation plan shared in February, workforce reductions were made on Tuesday as part of difficult but necessary decisions and realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that the company’s focus is to ensure that GitHub is a fully-integrated platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for developers and customers.

The impacted employees were offered two months’ pay as severance package and made to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

‘Consolidating business operations’

“With this focus, we are consolidating certain business operations, some of which happen to be based in India, and it has resulted in role eliminations. We remain committed to serving the Indian market and these changes will not impact our customers and the 10 million (one crore) developers in India who use GitHub daily,” the spokesperson said.

Also read: After Microsoft, Google’s Alphabet to lay off 12,000 employees globally

Microsoft had, in January, announced that it would lay off around 10,000 employees to align its cost structure with revenues.

Microsoft acquired GitHub for USD 7.5 billion in a stock deal on June 2, 2018.

(With Agency inputs)