Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs

Congratulations on helping Larry Ellison's AI cloud boom. Now please pack your bags and go

Oracle posted record revenue during its latest quarter, but that hasn't stopped the company from chopping more employees. 

Reports began appearing on social media early Monday that staff were having trouble accessing corporate systems such as email and Slack, which essentially served as a sign that they had lost their jobs.

According to a number of now-ex Oracle employees posting in a LinkedIn thread, layoff emails weren’t sent to personal email addresses, leaving a good number of people unsure what was happening outside of calls to supervisors, prior heads-up that they were on the chopping block, and the like. 

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It seems some employees did manage to access their accounts and view the layoff email, as a copy was shared with Business Insider, which published it in its coverage of this latest round of job cuts. 

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“After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change,” the email read. “As a result, today is your last working day.”

While the message didn’t indicate what sort of severance agreement Oracle was offering those whose jobs were cut, other reports indicate that those caught up in the layoffs were being offered four weeks of pay, plus an additional week for each year of employment. Some of those who claimed on LinkedIn they were part of the layoffs had been at Oracle for 20 years. 

Oracle has been undertaking a large-scale restructuring of its workforce and business over the past year, with some 21,000 jobs vanishing amid efforts to adjust the company’s trajectory to align with its new AI datacenter buildout mission. 

It’s not clear how many employees were laid off as part of this latest wave of cuts, but it could be a lot based on Oracle’s accounting. Oracle’s latest quarterly SEC filing, submitted to the federal government at the end of last week, indicates it’s increasing its restructuring budget for 2026 by an additional $700 million. Prior to the end of the quarter, Oracle’s 2026 restructuring plan was expected to cost up to $2.1 billion, primarily due to employee severance, contract termination costs, and other exit expenses, the filing indicated.

That’s a fraction of Oracle’s $19.3 billion in revenue in Q1 FY27, ended August 31. Oracle also reported $4.76 billion in net income. Revenue was up about 30 percent year over year.

In other words, Oracle’s big bet on AI infrastructure investments has started paying off for it. As is often the case when such investments start paying dividends, the employees who helped make that possible end up being cast into the wind.