Employees discovered they had no further working days when they received notification emails on Monday. The technology giant has already removed 21,000 positions during its fiscal year ending 31 May—roughly 13 percent of its total headcount—to finance massive data centre investments.
The latest reduction began on Monday, with three affected workers and copies of the dismissal notification providing details to Business Insider. The message informed staff that their positions had been eliminated "as part of a broader organizational change" and that "today is your last working day".
Throughout Monday, affected individuals shared their status on professional networks including LinkedIn, Reddit and Blind.
The announcement followed a predictable pattern. Oracle revealed on Friday that it had allocated an additional $700m for restructuring expenses, bringing its total reserve to approximately $2.8bn, with language in regulatory filings indicating "additional actions that we expect to take". The company acted on this forecast within two business days.
Depth of cuts outpaces competitors
What distinguishes Oracle's approach is not the absolute number of departures but their concentration. The company reduced its workforce from roughly 162,000 to 141,000 between fiscal years, eliminating approximately 21,000 roles in twelve months. Monday's announcement represents additional reductions beyond this figure.
Amazon has shed more people in raw numbers—approximately 57,000 corporate positions since 2022, representing about 16 percent of its corporate staff. However, Amazon spread these reductions across four years. Oracle compressed its 13 percent reduction into a single fiscal year.
No other major technology company has achieved such depth in a comparable timeframe.
Funding the infrastructure expansion
The payroll reductions serve a specific purpose. Oracle reported $28.5bn in capital expenditure during its first quarter, compared with $8.5bn in the prior year, while maintaining its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance at $90bn to $95bn.
The company invested $55.7bn on data centre infrastructure in the previous year and has been borrowing to cover remaining costs. Analysts at TD Cowen estimate the annual payroll savings from these cuts at $8bn to $10bn—a substantial but incomplete offset to the infrastructure spending.
European compliance concerns
A significant complication emerges from Oracle's global workforce composition: approximately two-thirds of its 141,000 employees work outside the United States.
The EU Collective Redundancies Directive imposes specific requirements on employers undertaking large-scale workforce reductions. These include good-faith consultation with worker representatives, written notification to authorities, and a mandatory standstill period of at least 30 days before dismissals become effective.
A 2024 Court of Justice decision established that dismissals executed without proper notification are void and cannot be retroactively validated. An email notification stating that the current day represents the final working day would not comply with this framework. The extent to which European staff received such communications remains unclear.
Romania presents a particularly significant test case. Oracle eliminated approximately 500 positions there in June—its second reduction in under a year—at a facility that employs around 4,000 people and remains one of the company's principal European engineering centres.
Oracle declined to respond to Business Insider's request for comment. The company has not disclosed the total number of affected employees in this round, their geographic distribution, whether the $2.8bn restructuring reserve is now fully deployed, or whether the reductions are complete.
An internal document reviewed by Business Insider in the previous month suggested planned reductions would reach double-digit percentages on certain teams, implying the affected population extends well beyond the three confirmed cases.
Source: The Next Web
