Microsoft-owned software code hosting platform GitHub has fired its entire engineering team in India. The company has fired 142 developers in order to streamline its operations.

The decision affected employees in the Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Delhi offices of the company.

“What I am hearing: GitHub’s India engineering team is no more. Yesterday, the complete dev team was let go at once. We’re talking of ~100 engineers,” Gergely Orosz, who runs the newsletter Pragmatic Engineer, reported the layoffs.

An employee working in the Hyderabad office informed CNBC-TV18.com that rumours of the entire team being laid off were going on within the company for some time and there is an estimation that this was due to the Indian teams owning fewer and lower priority tasks and being smaller compared to other locations.

The employees have been given two months of pay as severance, added the source.

"As part of the reorganisation plan shared in February, workforce reductions were made on Tuesday as part of difficult but necessary decisions and realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward," the spokesperson said as reported by PTI.

Is AI the reason for the layoffs?

While these layoffs are not new, as they were announced as part of the reorganisation plan shared in February by GitHub, many users on LinkedIn and the anonymous website Blind are pointing out how this may be related to GitHub Copilot.

The Microsoft-owned company announced last month that it would lay off 10 percent of its workforce. There are reportedly more than 3,000 employees at GitHub worldwide. Additionally, Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's CEO, sent an email explaining why the engineering team was being laid off and the new budgetary changes.

“We are announcing a number of difficult decisions, including the departure of some Hubbers and the implementation of new budgetary realignments, designed to protect our business’s short-term health while also allowing us to invest in our long-term strategy,” Dohmke wrote in an email.

The CEO also stated in the same email that AI integration would be prioritised “with urgency.” “The age of AI has begun, and we have been at the forefront of this transformation with GitHub Copilot, our most successful product launch to date. With urgency, we have an enormous opportunity to build an integrated, AI-powered GitHub,” the communication stated.

Earlier this month Microsoft unveiled its latest artificial intelligence-powered tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot, which in the company's words, will "turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet."

Microsoft said the new feature combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with users' data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps.

Dhomke, in his blog post, wrote that GitHub Copilot has started a new age of software development as an AI pair programmer that keeps developers in the flow by auto-completing comments and code.

Also read: Microsoft announces Copilot for Work, an AI-powered feature for the 365 app suite

“And less than two years since its launch, GitHub Copilot is already writing 46 percent of code and helps developers code up to 55 percent faster,” Dhomke added.

Recently, a Twitter user Prashanth Rangaswamy, prompted GPT-4 to identify 20 current-day jobs that it could replace. The software gave a list of jobs that it can replace. Further Goldman Sachs in a report mentioned that as many as 300 million full-time jobs around the world could be automated in some way by the newest wave of artificial intelligence that has spawned platforms like ChatGPT.

Also read: ChatGPT: Our jobs could be in danger? Not just yet

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)