Verizon Communications offered voluntary severance packages last month to roughly 44,000 employees.That comes to more than a quarter of the carrier's workforce.

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Ticker Security Last Change Change % VZ VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC. 58.91 -0.92 -1.53%

A spokesman for the company confirmed the scope of the offer, which was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The severance packages will give Verizon "an opportunity to find more efficiencies in the size and scope of our V Team and help expedite the building of an innovative operating model for our future," Chief Executive Hans Vestberg wrote in a memo sent to employees last week and reviewed by the Journal.

Verizon seeks to cut $10 billion in costs and upgrade to a faster, 5G network.

Employees eligible for the severance packages were offered three weeks' pay for each year of service up to 60 weeks.

In addition to the offers, Verizon on the same day, notified many information technology employees that they were being transferred to Indian outsourcing giant Infosys as part of a $700 million outsourcing agreement.

Verizon had a global workforce of more than 153,000 employees.

The employees who either received the severance offer or are affected by the Infosys deal amounts to about 30% of the workforce.