GoKawiilOracle has started another wave of layoffs, with employees receiving termination emails early Monday morning as the company presses ahead with a sweeping restructuring. The latest cuts come after Oracle's workforce fell by roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, during fiscal 2026.
Before the latest round, Oracle employed approximately 141,000 people worldwide. The number of employees affected by the new cuts has not been publicly disclosed, but the company has now raised the estimated cost of its fiscal 2026 restructuring plan by $700 million, bringing the total to roughly $2.8 billion.
Earlier reports had estimated that Oracle's broader 2026 restructuring could eventually affect between 20,000 and 30,000 positions, but that figure was not a confirmed tally for the latest round.
Oracle's 6AM Layoff Emails Return
Affected employees received notification emails early in the morning, with the messages signalling immediate job termination rather than a transition period. Severance packages were offered to those let go, though the specific terms varied by role and region. Some teams experienced double-digit percentage cuts, according to an internal document reviewed by Business Insider.
Oracle's layoffs unfolded in the early morning for many employees, with termination emails arriving as early as 6 a.m. The process has drawn criticism from staff and sparked a wave of accounts on social media.
According to posts on a Reddit forum, the process appeared to follow a coordinated, almost clinical timeline. '4am Eastern Time is when federated logins were disabled. If you still have access, you are ok,' one user wrote, describing how Slack access was cut in a rolling wave between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., followed by termination emails landing 'on the dot' at 6 a.m.
Some employees said they discovered the cuts after waking up. 'I kept waking up in the middle of the night to check but logged in at 6:30am,' one employee wrote, noting a stock grant tied to a promotion was due next month, one that will now never materialise.
The scale of the cuts appears steep in parts of the business. One user described losing half of the team within Oracle's CSS organisation, with the layoffs sweeping up directors and managers alongside frontline staff in North American CSM teams.
One Reddit user who said he worked at an Oracle site in Texas claimed he discovered he'd been laid off when his badge failed at the gate. Locked out of Slack and unable to access his accounts on-site, he had to connect to the network from outside the building just to retrieve his own termination email and forward it to his personal address before losing access for good. The employee said he had started the role on February 2 and had received a "Meets Expectations" performance rating.
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