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A normal workday starts with checking email, not ending a career. For a wave of Oracle employees in the US, those two things happened at almost the same moment early Monday morning. Around 6 a.m. local time, workers included in the tech giant’s newest round of layoffs opened an email informing them their position had been eliminated, effective that same day.
The notification offered no lengthy transition period. According to Business Insider, which reviewed an internal email and spoke with three affected workers, the company cited a “broader organizational change” as the reason. For some employees, access to internal systems was already being cut off before the official notice ever landed in their inbox, according to accounts shared on social media and internal forums.
Oracle has not disclosed how many employees were affected in this specific wave. The company did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. Despite various estimates circulating online, there is currently no verified count of how many people lost their jobs Monday. What is confirmed is the severance terms offered to those let go, and the reaction building among employees who found out this way.
This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team for accuracy and clarity.
Severance: Four Weeks of Pay, Plus One Week for Every Year
According to the disclosed termination email, affected American employees were offered a severance package built on a simple formula: four weeks of base salary, plus one additional week for every year they had worked at the company. For someone with a decade at Oracle, that works out to roughly fourteen weeks of pay. It’s a cushion for an immediate, same-day departure with no advance warning.
For longtime employees, the abruptness sparked real anger on internal forums. Multiple workers described losing system access in the early morning hours, well before the termination email itself arrived, and one employee reported having worked at the company for more than 20 years before receiving that message. These accounts come from employee testimonials rather than official company statements, and should be read with that distinction in mind.
This was not a one-time event, either. Similar accounts, and a similar 6 a.m. termination pattern, have now surfaced at Oracle multiple times over the course of this year alone. That repetition raises a question worth examining directly: what does the actual scale of Oracle’s workforce reduction look like once you step back from any single Monday morning and look at the full year?
This Is at Least the Third Round of 6 A.M. Layoffs at Oracle This Year
Multiple outlets have now documented at least three separate rounds of this exact same pattern at Oracle in 2026: an abrupt early-morning email, a same-day termination, and no advance transition period. Similar waves reportedly hit the company in March and again in early September, before this latest round arrived. Oracle has not confirmed a single total across all three. Only the broader, publicly disclosed workforce numbers are on record.
According to Oracle’s own annual report, the company employed approximately 141,000 people worldwide as of the end of May 2026, including roughly 49,000 in the US and about 92,000 elsewhere. A year earlier, that number stood closer to 162,000, meaning overall headcount dropped by about 21,000 people, or roughly 13%. That figure captures net change only. It does not distinguish between layoffs, resignations, and other departures.
A 13% drop in headcount over a single year is a meaningful number, whatever mix of causes actually produced it. What makes it genuinely striking is something else entirely. It’s what Oracle has been doing with its money at the exact same time this shrinking was happening across the workforce, and how little those two trends actually seem to line up.
Oracle Is Spending $95 Billion on AI This Year While Cutting Staff
While employees were losing jobs, Oracle was dramatically ramping up spending elsewhere. Last quarter alone, the company spent about $28.5 billion on capital expenditures, compared with roughly $8.5 billion during the same period a year earlier. For the full current fiscal year, Oracle projects capital expenditures somewhere between $90 billion and $95 billion, aimed largely at expanding data centers and computing infrastructure for AI.
The company is not shrinking by any normal business measure, either. Quarterly revenue rose 30% to $19.3 billion, and cloud infrastructure revenue specifically leaped 121% to $7.4 billion. Oracle has not claimed the employees affected in this wave were replaced by AI directly, and there is no evidence connecting any individual role to that specific technology. The timing, though, places the layoffs squarely alongside the company’s biggest infrastructure buildout in its history.
What’s emerging here fits a broader pattern across the tech industry. Layoffs no longer only happen when business is actually shrinking. Sometimes they happen precisely while revenue and investment are both breaking records, with money and positions simply being redirected toward whatever the company has decided matters more right now. For the employees who opened that email at 6 a.m., that distinction is almost certainly far less comforting than it might sound on a balance sheet.