Oracle Fires Workers at 6 AM: 'Today Is Your Last Working Day'
Oracle's Cold 6AM Layoff Emails Hit Staff Amid New Wave of Cuts
Oracle has launched another round of layoffs, notifying employees via early-morning emails that their jobs were terminated immediately. The cuts follow a reduction of about 21,000 workers, or 13% of staff, in fiscal 2026, and the company has raised its restructuring cost estimate by $700 million to roughly $2.8 billion. Some teams lost half their members, and longtime employees received impersonal notices.
24 years as a QA at Oracle and just an impersonal email.
- petilon
Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1].
That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2].
All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP.
That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-...
- sailfast
> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.
Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?
Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."
Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.
- a34729t
My employer has somehow managed to avoid the constant layoffs since 2022 trend, shockingly, and I think this is a big reason we have relatively low churn despite not having many promotions, refreshers, etc (on top of some relatively uncommon benefits for a large tech company). I was recently interviewing a few engineers from FAANG+ companies who are desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears. I wish more companies would realize what a selling point this is, and I wish my CEO would publicly brag about how is he is competent enough to not need to churn through 10+% of his workforce a year AND have great stock price growth over the last 6 years.
- lambdaone
While I feel sorry for the people involved, Oracle as a company richly deserves this, for reasons far too familiar to everyone here. This is a come-uppance that has been waiting to happen for decades.
- rinconrex
As someone also freshly laid off (not Oracle though), let me solemnly acknowledge my new cohorts. Best of luck to everyone, it's tough out there. Stay sharp and focused, hoping for the best.
Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?
- 3pm
I wonder how this holds up in the age of AI
- rf15
I love the smell of [layoff emails] in the morning.
Makes me wonder why they're shedding so much and if Zitron was a little right after all.
- maerF0x0
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-2...
Versus https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring...
It's unclear how many were actually cut because the 21000 / 13% numbers were reported nearly 3 months ago?