Microsoft announced another set of employee layoffs on October 29.

The cuts are believed to be approximately 3,000 employees from support staff in the human resources, finance, sales, marketing and IT as report by ZDNet.

The 3,000 employee layoffs today are part of the 18,000 employees to lose their jobs within the year which was announced by Microsoft officials last July.

Microsoft officials announced of the planned cuts of 18,000 employees in July. 12,500 of these are believed to be part of the employees acquired from Nokia's handset and service businesses. The second round of those cuts will hit in September of about 2,100 employees.

The final batch of cuts will be announced in early 2015.

In July, there were already 13,000 employees included in the cuts which were mostly former Nokia employees based on report by ZDNet.

Today's cuts were confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson, "We've taken another step that will complete almost all the 18,000 reductions announced in July. The reductions happening today are spread across many different business units, and many different countries."

Critics called Microsoft's approach as "unwise" as it will prolong uncertainty among employees, bring down the workers' morale, give talking points to rivals and generate bad image for the company. But the company apparently is confident in their decision.

Microsoft officials said that the layoffs will make the company incur pre-tax charges of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion for compensation and related benefits costs and asset-related charges over the next four quarters.

Microsoft had a previous major layoff in 2009, when management eliminated 5,800 positions. Steve Ballmer, the CEO at that time said the cuts was attributed to a "response to the global economic downturn."