When BMW emailed about 40,000 German employees on Thursday to say their personal severance offers were ready, almost all of them seem to have clicked at once. The carmaker’s internal HR platform, built to handle ordinary workdays, did not cope, and the launch of one of the company’s biggest voluntary exit programmes began with a crash.

Handelsblatt first reported the outage, according to coverage by BMWBlog and People Matters. BMW confirmed the incident to trade publication Automobilwoche. A spokesperson said usage was high after the emails went out, and People Matters quotes the explanation as “employees were very curious to view the emails.” The company did not give technical details, and the reports reviewed here do not say how long the portal was down or what caused the overload.

What employees were clicking to see

The offers are part of a cost-cutting plan under which BMW aims to cut about 8,000 jobs by the end of 2027, mainly office roles in Germany, with factory production workers not affected, according to BMWBlog and People Matters. Participation is voluntary: employees can look at their individual offers before deciding whether to leave, and they can decline and keep their jobs.

Earlier reports give more of the shape. Electrive, citing Reuters, AFP and Handelsblatt, said about 40,000 of BMW’s roughly 85,000 German employees would receive individual offers, with about €1 billion allocated, and that the cuts would come mostly through voluntary severance, non-replacement of vacant posts and partial retirement. It also reported that BMW wants to avoid layoffs and expects savings of about €1 billion a year from 2028. Electrive notes that BMW had not confirmed those figures at the time. BMW has not disclosed how many employees will accept offers, and no severance amounts or payment terms have been published in the reports reviewed.

Why BMW is cutting

The programme comes as the carmaker faces weaker numbers. Electrive reports that BMW’s first-half 2026 revenue fell 8% to €62.27 billion and pre-tax profit fell 29.4% to €4.05 billion. BMWBlog reports that BMW and MINI sales fell 20.4% to 261,773 vehicles through June, and that China, which accounted for about one in four deliveries in 2025 and remains the group’s largest single market, is seeing buyers increasingly choose domestic brands. BMW hopes its Neue Klasse electric models will help recover sales. People Matters adds that BMW is considering ending models it views as insufficiently profitable, naming the 2 Series Active Tourer, though no firm timeline was given.

CEO Milan Nedeljković has said, “That’s why it’s important to be lean and agile,” according to electrive. The works council chairman, Martin Kimmich, told Spiegel Online that the council had “concentrated on creating security for employees and implementing binding safeguards.”

An uncomfortable irony

There is a note of irony in an HR platform buckling under the weight of employees looking up their own exit terms, and trade coverage has picked up on it. BMWBlog called the glitch an “own goal,” which is the author’s opinion. People Matters framed it as a sign of the operational strain that comes with rolling out a large programme through an internal digital platform. A spike of this kind is not unusual when tens of thousands of people receive a life-changing notice at the same moment, and BMW’s own explanation, that people were curious, is plausible but unproven.

For the employees themselves, the decision is the harder part. Each offer is personal, the deadlines vary, and the choice between taking a package and staying at a company in the middle of an electric-vehicle transition is not one a portal outage makes easier.

What is still unknown

The reports reviewed do not say how many employees have accepted offers, how the 8,000 cuts will be spread across departments, or what the programme will cost in total. BMW also plans to cut departments and associated management positions by 20% by mid-2027, per BMWBlog and People Matters.