Oracle layoffs: The 6 am email didn't come, so employees are counting Slack members

On September 1, Oracle employees awoke to a sense of uncertainty, as the 6 am email they had been awaiting never arrived. The company's workforce had been abuzz with speculation, following a Business Insider report from mid-August suggesting that Oracle had been instructed to prepare staff lists for layoffs before the start of its second fiscal quarter on September 1. The report claimed that reductions on certain teams could reach double-digit percentages.

Unlike the previous March layoffs, which were announced with termination emails arriving around 6 am local time, this time there was no official announcement. Instead, employees were counting Slack members on a megathread on r/employeesOfOracle, watching the numbers drop hour by hour. Some argued that the decrease in membership indicated layoffs, while others believed it was simply a result of month-end attrition.

Rumors circulated about when the cuts might take place, with some suggesting they had been pushed to September 15, aligned with a scheduled townhall, or even to September 30. Oracle remained tight-lipped, refusing to comment and confirming none of the speculation.

The March 31 layoff email had set the tone for how employees reacted to dates on the fiscal calendar, with its short, procedural format emphasizing the elimination of roles as part of an organizational change. The March wave of layoffs affected roughly 10,000 positions across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico, impacting various departments including Oracle Health, Cloud, Sales, Customer Success, and NetSuite's India Development Centre.

In the absence of formal communication, employees turned to clues for guidance. The presence of Device Lock Automation in Oracle's identity management portal had raised suspicions, with some employees believing it signified inclusion in the layoff list. However, others argued that it was a provision for all accounts and only became relevant if an internal system flagged a specific user, serving to lock machines as cuts occurred.

Practical questions arose, such as the nature of severance. In India, the earlier round followed the N+2 formula, where N represents years of service, paid out in months, with unvested RSUs forfeited. In the US, remote workers were often excluded from WARN protections, resulting in roughly 10 days of pay and benefits instead of the standard 60 days. This distinction proved significant for many of the remaining 141,000 employees who worked remotely.

Oracle's financial situation provided context for the layoffs. The company's headcount had decreased by about 21,000, or 13%, in the fiscal year ended May 31, 2025, dropping from roughly 162,000 to 141,000 employees, with around 49,000 of them remaining in the US. Restructuring charges amounted to $1.8 billion, a 391% increase from $374 million the previous year, against a $2.1 billion cap set in the 10-K filed on June 22.

Despite raising $43 billion in debt and $5 billion in equity, Oracle faced negative free cash flow of $23.7 billion, leading to concerns about the impact of the fresh round of job cuts on its financial health.