The account was banned at 4 a.m., Slack went offline at 5 a.m., and layoff notification emails were received at 6 a.m. It is revealed that Oracle has launched a new round of layoffs.

At 4 a.m., employees' internal accounts became invalid; at 5 a.m., Slack accounts went offline one after another; at 6 a.m., a layoff email arrived...

On September 14, many Oracle employees flooded into communities such as Reddit to reveal that they had been laid off.

According to the situations shared by these employees, this round of layoffs involves multiple business and functional teams of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Security, Fusion, NetSuite, Oracle Health and other departments.

And this is not the first large-scale layoff of Oracle this year.

Over the past year, the number of global Oracle employees has dropped from about 162,000 to 141,000, a reduction of about 21,000, or a decrease of about 13%. While this round of layoffs is taking place, it is also noteworthy that Oracle is continuing to increase its investment in AI infrastructure. Not long ago, according to Reuters, Oracle disclosed to regulators that it would add about $700 million to the restructuring plan cost for fiscal year 2026, bringing the total estimated cost to about $2.8 billion. The newly added costs include employee severance compensation, contract termination fees and other expenses.

But compared with these figures, what really makes this round of layoffs attract attention is the experiences told by the employees themselves.

In the wee hours, permissions were revoked

This time, there is no transition period. Many employees received the news of layoffs very directly, and even some people found something wrong before receiving the layoff email.

One employee wrote on Reddit: "At 4 a.m. Eastern Time, the company's unified login permissions began to be shut down; from 5 a.m. to 5:30 a.m., Slack accounts began to become invalid one after another; at 6 a.m. sharp, the layoff email was sent."

Some other employees said they did not find out they were laid off until they woke up.

One employee wrote: "I woke up again and again in the middle of the night just to confirm if I still had my job, but when I tried to log in at 6:30 in the morning..." He also mentioned that the stock award he was supposed to get for his promotion was expected to arrive next month, but now the stock award will never be fulfilled.

Another Oracle employee from Abilene, Texas, experienced a more direct situation. He said he received the layoff email at 5 a.m. but did not notice it at that time. It was not until he arrived at the office that morning that he swiped his employee badge to enter the workplace and found that the badge was no longer usable.

Later, he found that his Slack account had been locked. Worried that his work email would soon lose access, the employee left the workplace, reconnected to the company network, logged into his work email, and forwarded the layoff-related emails to his personal email.

The employee also said that he joined Oracle only on February 2 this year, and his latest performance evaluation was "Meets Expectations". That means, according to his own account, this layoff was not due to substandard performance.

Coincidentally, a netizen who claimed to be an Oracle employee said: "I received the layoff email. I used to be on Jeppe Larsen's team in the US region. I used to get a 4-point performance rating (Exceeds Expectations) all the time, until our team was transferred under the OCI banner, and then I got a 3-point rating (Meets Expectations) for the first time. I have never received a "Needs Improvement" rating, and I have worked at Oracle for more than 4 years."

In addition, another employee who has worked as a QA at Oracle for 24 years said bluntly: "I have worked as a QA at Oracle for 24 years, but what I received was an impersonal email."

Of course, these employees' statements have not been independently verified so far, and Oracle has not publicly responded to this round of layoffs. But such experiences are constantly appearing on social media.

A Standardized Layoff Email

Judging from the emails received by employees, the reasons given by Oracle are very standardized. Foreign media Techtimes also exposed the full content of the email, as follows:

We are writing to inform you of a regrettable news regarding your position.

After careful consideration and in light of Oracle's current business needs, we have decided to eliminate your position as part of a broader organizational adjustment across the company. Therefore, today will be your last working day at Oracle.

Thank you for your dedication and efforts during your tenure, as well as the contributions you have made to the company.

After you sign the relevant separation documents, you will be eligible for corresponding severance compensation in accordance with the terms and conditions of the company's severance plan. You will receive an email from DocuSign sent to your Oracle work email, which will contain specific information such as the severance package and the separation date.

Immediate Action Required

To ensure that you can receive subsequent important information, including Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and relevant documents to help you complete the separation transition, you must provide a personal email address.

Please click here to submit your personal email address immediately. If an error occurs during submission, please fill in and submit a new form again.

Please note: The personal email address you provide will only be used to receive information related to the separation and severance agreement.

Your computer, work email, voicemail and file access permissions will be shut down soon, and you will no longer be able to log in to the company's computers at that time.

We also remind you that you may not download, copy or retain any Oracle confidential information, including not sending any Oracle confidential information to your personal email via email.

Thank you for your contributions to the company. If you have other questions, please contact the HR team through the "Ask HR" page.

Oracle Management

The wording of the entire email contains almost no personalized content. For the company, this is an organizational adjustment; for those who received the email, it means that the very day is their last day at Oracle.

Oracle's Transformation

If you only look at the experiences of the employees, this is a very brutal corporate layoff. But when you put Oracle's actions this year together, it is impossible to avoid talking about AI.

Data just released by Oracle shows that its capital expenditure in the latest fiscal quarter has reached about $28.5 billion, and the company expects its capital expenditure in fiscal year 2027 to still reach $90 billion to $95 billion. And when it comes to where the money is spent? AI infrastructure is bound to be the largest expense.

At the same time, Oracle also plans to raise about $40 billion through debt and equity financing in fiscal year 2027 to support the expansion of its cloud infrastructure business.

Faced with the situation where the number of employees continues to decline on one hand and investment in AI data centers continues to increase on the other, the outside world has different views.

Some people believe that Oracle is reducing costs through layoffs, and then investing the funds in AI data centers to purchase NVIDIA hardware and provide computing power to customers such as OpenAI. In his view, the technical barriers of this type of business are limited, and Oracle's software business that has real long-term accumulation may instead be under cost pressure.

Others believe that one of the scarcest resources in the current AI era is precisely computing resources. Data centers, power, GPUs and large-scale infrastructure themselves are profitable businesses. As long as the demand for AI computing power continues to grow, the money Oracle is investing now may become a new source of growth.

Therefore, what is really worth paying attention to in this round of layoffs may not just be "how many people Oracle has laid off again".

When a traditional software giant pours more and more money into AI infrastructure, what will happen next? Which businesses will be re-adjusted, which positions will be redefined, and how many employees will be the first to face changes in this transformation?

Reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49702239

https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1wfyq8n/sept_14_layoffs_if_you_have_been_impacted_post/

https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring-costs-2-8-billion-1808676

This article is from the WeChat official account "CSDN", author: Tu Min, published with authorization from 36Kr.