The Next Wave Of Microsoft Layoffs Is Expected To Hit Thursday

Even though most of the 18,000 employees affected in Microsoft's massive layoff have already been cut, there's still about 5,000 more employees on the hook to be let go.

And it looks like the next round of Microsoft employees will be let go this week, on Sept. 18, sources have told ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.

In July, after months of speculation, Microsoft said it would cut 18,000 total employees over six months with 13,000 let go immediately. Nearly all of them, 12,500, were cut from Nokia. Sources told Business Insider that this was because Microsoft was shedding Nokia's feature phone business.

Foley says that this isn't entirely true. Sources told her that not all of the 13,000 were notified, so more of that group could be let go in the next round.

In the first round, among non-Nokia employees, test engineers across the company were the hardest hit, sources told Business Insider. That's because CEO Satya Nadella is changing the organizational structure of how Microsoft builds products favored by Steven Sinofsky. In that structure, testing new features was a separate job function from building those features, a source told us.

In this round, however, cuts are happening across the company in every unit, according to Foley.

In the meantime, the review process has been underway in August and September in the Sales, Marketing & Services Group (SMSG) team, which reports to Kevin Turner. That team was the only one still using a few bits from the old "stack rank" review system, Business Insider previously reported. However, we understand that SMSG folks are not supposed to be targeted for this layoff based on that old stack ranking system.

Microsoft declined comment.