Staff at Microsoft’s Africa Development Centre in Nairobi were told on Monday, October 12, 2026, that the centre is closing. Microsoft has not said how many people work there, when their jobs end, or what happens to them next.
The company has been careful with its wording. A spokesperson said the “proposed changes” are part of global restructuring and have “impacted the engineering department in Kenya.”
The same statement said Microsoft will keep operating in the country and supporting customers in the region.
That engineering department is the ADC. The statement never uses the word closure, and it never denies one. The closure claim comes from employees who spoke to CIO Africa, and all of them say the entire centre was told its jobs are going.
So the situation is this: the people who work there say it is closing, and the company will only say that the engineers have been affected.
On the same Monday, Information and Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo met a Microsoft delegation. It was led by Jeff Bullwinkel, a vice president and deputy general counsel for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and included Angela Ng’ang’a, who runs Microsoft’s East Africa operation.
Kabogo said Microsoft briefed him on its “evolving operations in Kenya.” He said he pushed for keeping local talent, protecting jobs at the Nairobi engineering centre and keeping investors confident in Kenya’s tech sector.
He added that Microsoft reaffirmed its long-term commitment to Kenya and that both sides will draft a joint action plan covering AI in government, digitizing public services, cybersecurity, digital infrastructure and skills.
What the public information does not show is whether the meeting was called because of the closure news. Kabogo’s statement also gives no job numbers.
Microsoft announced the ADC in May 2019, with Nairobi and Lagos as the first two sites, backed by a planned $100 million over five years.
The Nairobi centre officially opened in March 2022 and had more than 450 engineers and product leaders by then, according to reports at the time. Catherine Muraga became managing director that June.
This was real product work, not a support office. The centre’s own site lists teams on Identity (the systems behind signing in to Microsoft accounts), Microsoft 365, Windows and devices, security and developer tools.
The same building in Westlands, Dunhill Towers, also houses Microsoft Research Africa and the Microsoft Garage, which runs innovation projects and events.
Lagos went first. Microsoft shut its Nigerian centre in 2024, so Nairobi was the last of the two original hubs.
Microsoft cut around 4,800 roles in July, about 2.1% of its global workforce, mostly in sales and Xbox. The memo said engineering teams would “evolve their structure and priorities” and that more changes were coming.
Another 268 Xbox jobs went on September 22. Microsoft has done rounds like this for years, including 6,000 jobs in May 2025.
Staff may have been leaving well before Monday. On September 23, Kipkorir Arap Kirui, a former ADC senior product manager now at Google, wrote on LinkedIn about what employees told him.
According to him, people were offered a choice near the end of the quarter between a performance improvement plan (PIP) and a “voluntary” exit. Those who took the PIP reportedly got six weeks to turn things around.
Some accounts also claimed employees were restricted from showing separation agreements to independent lawyers. All of this is secondhand and unverified, and Microsoft has not responded to it.
Microsoft has not said how many jobs are going, the end date, or whether anyone gets transferred to another team or country.
READ: Microsoft Fires Unknown Number of Devs, Managers in Nairobi
For the wider market, a few hundred experienced engineers, many with years on global products, will soon be looking for work. Local startups and tech employers may gain access to talent that was hard to hire before.
The next things to watch are the headcount, the timeline, the terms offered to staff, and what the government and Microsoft put in their action plan. Until Microsoft says more, the people with the clearest picture are the employees who were in the room on Monday.
