ActiBlizz finance, accounting, HR, etc is no longer needed. Microsoft already has all those needs covered.

That's not 1900 people, that's like 50.

I've been part of these before; they cut by pay. Junior artist? You stay. Senior artist? Bye. It goes all the way down to QA. A place I used to work at had massive layoffs, and were left with a QA team of 15 whose most senior member had 6 months in the industry.

This is phase 2. Phase one was last year when they laid of 10,000. those were the finance/accounting/etc people. This is specifically the games area which at this point, according to my friends caught in said layoff, says it’s mostly seniors across all (gaming) divisions.

EDIT: To be clear to the downvoters: 1. I worked at Microsoft (gaming) 5 years ago, and was caught in one of these layoffs. 2. It won't be areas like accounting/HR/finance because that was last year. I know people caught in these layoffs, and it's seniors in each department.

Microsoft uses, especially in Canada, a system to bypass hiring full-time employees, which they have to do here legally after 5 years of employment every X years (I forget how many). They hire from 3rd party contractors, and then refuse to rehire you after you've worked 4+ years, until a six month gap has occurred and you change 3rd party vendors. They do this with over half of their employees, so their gaming division has a TINY HR department because most of the staff don't technically work for Microsoft. I met 'our' HR at a meeting shortly before we were all laid off, and had never had any contact with any of them (nor anyone in payroll, etc, because that was all done by our 3rd party vendors.)