Oracle layoffs: Employees get the 6am email again
Oracle began cutting jobs again on September 14, and the people affected found out in almost exactly the sequence they did in March. Slack sessions dropped out in a rolling wave between 5am and 5.30am. On Reddit’s r/employeesOfOracle forum, where a thread crossed 300 comments within hours, workers watched Slack membership fall by roughly 3,000 to 4,000 through the morning and posted their orgs one after another: OCI security, CI/CD, enterprise engineering, observability, executive escalations, Fusion, NetSuite sales, Customer Success Services, Oracle Health, EPM, HR Technology, data centre compliance, and the Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. In a filing on Friday, Oracle said restructuring costs would rise by about $700 million, taking the expected cost of its fiscal 2026 plan to roughly $2.8 billion, and tied part of the plan to the adoption of AI across some functions. First-quarter capital expenditure came in at $28.5 billion against $8.5 billion a year earlier, and the fiscal 2027 forecast stayed at $90 billion to $95 billion. Free cash flow ran to negative $5.40 billion. Headcount had already fallen by 21,000 in the fiscal year that ended May 31, leaving about 141,000 employees before Monday. Revenue backlog grew by $26 billion to $664 billion, the figure Oracle keeps pointing to as proof the spending works. The stock is down about 23% this year. Since August, employees had traded dates on Reddit: September 1, then the 15th, then the 30th.
None of them was announced.
Then, at 6am local time, an email from “Oracle Leadership” arrived, according to three impacted employees and a copy of the notification seen by Business Insider, carrying the line staff had been bracing for since August: “We are sharing some difficult news regarding your position. Federated logins stopped working at around 4am Eastern. Badges failed at office gates. The role had been eliminated as part of a broader organisational change, and the same day was the last working day. The round had been expected since mid-August, when managers were asked to submit lists of employees whose jobs were going, with payroll to come down early in Oracle’s second fiscal quarter. Oracle has not commented. The one that counted arrived as a login failure at 4am.
The financial backdrop shifted three days earlier.