Trump Officials Question Microsoft’s H-1B Hiring

Microsoft H-1B scrutiny after the outage

Microsoft‘s large number of H-1B workers has drawn criticism from the Trump administration. This comes after a global outage affected Microsoft services across the world.

The Inspector General of the DoL, Anthony D’Esposito criticized Microsoft on X. In his post, D’Esposito said that Microsoft can process 6,000 H-1B applications but can’t fix people’s Outlook inboxes.

The outage began on November 12th, and affected services like Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. Over 130,000 reports were received by the website Downdetector from across 74 countries.

A Microsoft spokesperson has spoken to Newsweek regarding the criticism. They said that the disruption was not related to their immigration program in anyway.

USCIS data shows that Microsoft was approved for 6,258 H-1B applications in 2025. This is up from 4,700 in 2024, though many of the 2025 applications were renewals, and not new applications.

2025 also saw Microsoft lay off 16,000 workers globally, while continuing to pursue H-1B approvals. D’Esposito has said that serious red flags, and that investigations remain active.

This criticism is the latest attack against Microsoft in a continuing tension between them and the administration. In early October, JD Vance shut off their visa-to-green card pipeline, suspending their PERM applications.