Oracle layoffs: As Oracle leadership prepares to send ‘6am layoff email’ on September 1, company asks managers to give a list of…
Oracle is lining up another round of job cuts this month, and the deadline is set by its own calendar. Managers have been asked to draw up lists of employees whose roles are being eliminated, with the company looking to bring payroll down before September 1—the day its fiscal second quarter opens. Business Insider, which first reported the plan citing people familiar with it and an internal document, said reductions on some teams could reach double-digit percentages.The cuts would land on top of a year in which the company already removed about 21,000 full-time roles, roughly 13% of its workforce. Headcount fell from around 162,000 in May 2025 to about 141,000 at the end of May 2026, with roughly 49,000 of those remaining in the United States. What makes this round sting is Oracle’s own explanation. Its annual filing attributes part of the decline to the company’s adoption and deployment of AI—the same technology it is borrowing tens of billions of dollars to sell.
Oracle layoffs in March arrived as 6AM emails for 10,000+ employees and ended the same working day
Employees cut on March 31 found out first thing in the morning. The notification, sent from “Oracle Leadership,” told recipients their role had been eliminated as part of a broader organisational change and that it was their last working day. Staff in both the US and India were affected. LinkedIn posts from those let go pointed to Oracle Health, Sales, Cloud, Customer Success and NetSuite. Roughly 10,000 positions went in that single wave.The email itself was brisk. It thanked employees for their contributions, told them severance paperwork would arrive via DocuSign, and asked them to submit a personal email address immediately—because access to their computer, email and files was about to be switched off.
Oracle has burned through almost all of its $2.1 billion restructuring budget
Severance is not cheap. Oracle booked $1.8 billion in restructuring costs in FY2026, up from $374 million a year earlier, a 391% jump. Its 10-K, filed on June 22, capped the total expected cost of the plan at $2.1 billion, which leaves only about $300 million of headroom. Cuts at the scale Business Insider describes would either have to fit inside that remainder or push Oracle into its second new restructuring plan in three years. TD Cowen analysts estimated in January that shedding 20,000 to 30,000 workers could unlock $8 billion to $10 billion.
Why Oracle’s $55.7 billion AI data centre spending keeps the pressure on headcount
The money is going somewhere specific. Capital expenditure hit $55.7 billion in FY2026, up from $21.2 billion the year before, as Oracle raced to build data centres for customers including OpenAI. It raised $43 billion in debt and $5 billion in equity over the year, expects around $40 billion more in FY2027, and ran free cash flow of negative $23.7 billion. Interest expense alone climbed to $4.6 billion from $3.6 billion.The underlying business is not the problem. FY2026 revenue rose 17% to $67.4 billion, cloud infrastructure revenue grew 77%, and remaining performance obligations closed the year at $638 billion after ending Q3 at $553 billion. Oracle has also told investors that AI code generation is letting it reorganise product development into smaller teams, saying the technology helps it build “more software in less time with fewer people.“That sentence, written for shareholders in March, reads differently in August. Investors have not been won over either—the stock is down more than 20% this year, and shareholders sued in January over what Oracle said about how much it would need to borrow to service its $300 billion OpenAI commitment.For the employees on this month’s lists, the reasoning is beside the point. The jobs are being removed to meet a date on a fiscal calendar, and the payoff Oracle is betting on will arrive after they have gone.
