Oracle has begun sending emails to thousands of its employees telling them that their jobs have been eliminated and with instructions to return your equipment and credentials. The news will not come as a surprise to those who follow the day-to-day life of the technology sector. The company founded by Larry Ellison had been adjusting its internal structure to face the astronomical cost of their investments in AI.
The company, which had 162,000 employees in May 2025, has not officially confirmed the magnitude of the cuts, giving an exact figure. However, two people familiar with the process confirmed to CNBC that the layoffs affected thousands of workersalthough they asked to remain anonymous because the announcement had not yet been made public.
Dismissed by mail
The first people affected by the cuts began receiving emails from Oracle’s Human Resources department yesterday afternoon. The email to which Business Insider has had access It included the following message, attributed to the company: “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your position as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last day of work.”
Some of the employees who received this email they published it on their social media profiles.
The WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) Act requires companies with more than 100 employees to provide at least 60 days’ notice before carrying out layoffs. According to published Reutersat the moment Oracle had only reported 491 layoffs in the state of Washington and in its Seattle offices as of June 1.
The cuts have not been concentrated in a single department, but have reached very diverse areas. According to testimonies from former employees, the affected areas include Oracle Health, the sales department, the cloud division, customer service and NetSuite.
The billion-dollar cost of restructuring
Reducing staff on this scale is not cheap. In a document filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Oracle reported a $1.6 billion item intended to cover “employee severance costs” in its 2026 Restructuring Plan.
As indicated Reutersthe total expenses of its reorganization plan during fiscal year 2026 could reach $2.1 billion, most of it intended to cover compensation for the dismissal of its employees.
The origin of this restructuring must be sought in Oracle’s expansion plans in infrastructure for artificial intelligence. At the beginning of the year, the company announced plans for raise 50 billion dollars through debt and equity in order to finance its growth. This figure represents a very significant jump compared to the 35,000 million that had initially been estimated as expenses for fiscal year 2026.
The layoffs that Oracle is carrying out They are not an isolated case in the technology sector. Massive cuts combined with a scenario of billionaire profits and increasing investment in AI have become a common strategy among large technology companies.
Amazon, for example, announced at the beginning of 2026 the dismissal of some 16,000 jobsof which already has executed about 14,000 around the world, including its subsidiaries in Spain. Meta, for its part, announced the dismissal of a good part of its metaverse development teams with the argument of restructuring its staff to make it more competitive for AI.
The response of shareholders to the decision to cut their workforce is not new either. Oracle share price accumulated a fall 25% so far this year, a greater decline than that recorded by any other large technology company in the same period. However, after the news of the layoffs became known, its price has turned upwards and has already increased by 6%.
Image | Flickr (Oracle PR)
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