HCL Fires 350 Employees Who Were Working On Microsoft Project: Will Other IT Firms Also Start Firing?

One of the leading Indian IT companies HCL Technologies has fired over 300 employees, who were informed about it in a town hall last week.

The ones laid off were from different countries, including India.

Here’s everything you need to know about the Indian IT giant laying off 350 employees from its offices globally.

HCL Tech Fires 350 Employees: Complete Details

According to a report by Moneycontrol, the IT giant HCL Tech has fired 350 employees globally, from geographies including India, Philippines and even Guatemala, among others.

It has come to knowledge that the laid off employees were working on HCL Tech’s client Microsoft’s news-related products, essentially for the latter giant’s news platform MSN.

One of the laid off employees requesting anonymity said, “Microsoft had an issue with the quality of work. We used to monitor, curate and edit content for its news platform MSN from across countries like India, Europe and the US. They had recently automated the process as well for global news monitoring. Prior to this, two years ago, Burda Media was managing this site.”

According to the report, the laid off employees were given the news at a town hall in the previous week, and their last working day would be Sept 30. They will be offered severance pay. 

Further, reports suggest that the Noida-based HCL Technologies’ contract with Microsoft has come to an end and the contract will now likely pass to some other IT vendor.

Names of Accenture to replace HCL Tech in Microsoft’s project has been doing the rounds and could likely be one of the choices on the US-based tech major’s list.

Firing employees have been on a swift rise, especially recently. Of all the IT heavyweights in the country, the Bengaluru-based Infosys currently houses the highest attrition rate at 28.4%, followed by Wipro, with attrition at 23.3% and Tech Mahindra at 22%.