Oracle layoffs 2026: Employees in the US and India are tracking Slack counts after the 6 am layoff email failed to arrive on September 1.
At 6 am on September 1, thousands of Oracle employees checked their inboxes and found nothing. Roughly 10,000 positions went in that single wave, spanning the US, India, Canada and Mexico, and hitting Oracle Health, Cloud, Sales, Customer Success and NetSuite’s India Development Centre. Some units were gutted in one pass, with staff reporting that teams like RHS and SVOS saw reductions of at least 30%, and that senior engineers, architects and programme managers were among those let go. In Bengaluru’s Fusion teams, workers noted that an unusual number of M4 and M6 managers had booked leave through September 1 and wondered whether the lists were already finalised.
Because the company announced anything, but because Business Insider reported in mid-August that managers had been asked to draw up lists of affected staff, with the aim of lowering payroll before Oracle’s second fiscal quarter opened on September 1, the date had taken on a life of its own inside Oracle, not.
The report, citing people familiar with the plans and an internal document, said reductions on some teams could run into double-digit percentages. Employees did the rest of the arithmetic themselves, drawing on the memory of March 31, when termination emails from “Oracle Leadership” landed at roughly 6 am local time and told recipients that the same day was their last working day. Employees said at the time there was no HR call and no manager conversation beforehand. None of it, according to a senior Oracle manager who wrote about it publicly on LinkedIn, was performance-based.
That silence is what the company’s workforce is talking about now. With no official word, staff have turned to whatever signals they can find. A recurring thread this week concerns a tool called Device Lock Automation, which several employees noticed had been provisioned to their accounts in Oracle’s identity management portal in late August. One post claimed its presence meant you were on the list. Others pushed back, saying it appears to have gone out to everyone and only matters if an internal system flags a specific user, and that the intent is to lock machines as and when cuts happen.