Oracle Begins New Layoff Round With 6 A.M. Termination Emails, Boosts Restructuring Charge to $2.8 Billion

A new layoff wave, announced before sunrise

Oracle began another round of layoffs on Monday, September 14, notifying US employees by early-morning email that their roles had been eliminated and that the day was their last working day. Copies of the notification reviewed by Business Insider read: "After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change … As a result, today is your last working day." The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts, and Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. India Today, the New York Post and Tech Times separately reported the same Sept. 14 start to a fresh wave of terminations.

The financial scale behind the head-count reduction

Oracle has raised the estimated cost of its fiscal 2026 restructuring plan by about $700 million, bringing the total to roughly $2.8 billion, according to reporting on the latest cuts. The new round comes on top of a reported decline of roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, during fiscal 2026, leaving Oracle with approximately 141,000 workers worldwide before the latest layoffs. Earlier coverage had estimated that Oracle's broader 2026 restructuring could eventually affect between 20,000 and 30,000 positions, but that range was not confirmed as a tally for the current round.

Severance terms, and how they compare with peers

According to documents viewed by Business Insider, Oracle offered recently laid-off US employees four weeks of severance plus an additional week per year of service. The documents did not state a maximum, though Oracle's standard pay plan, as previously reported, capped severance at 26 weeks: "four weeks of base salary for your first year of employment, plus one week's salary for each additional year of employment, based on your most recent hire date, up to a combined maximum of 26 weeks of base salary." Business Insider noted that Oracle's package appears less generous than those of some Big Tech peers, citing Salesforce's standard policy of up to 30 weeks plus a minimum of 9 or 13 weeks and 3 additional weeks per year of service, and Microsoft's recent offer of up to 39 weeks' base pay, with a minimum of 60 days and one or two additional weeks per six months of service depending on seniority.

How the cuts were carried out

Multiple outlets described a tightly coordinated process. According to accounts on a Reddit forum cited in coverage, federated logins were disabled at 4 a.m. Eastern Time, Slack access was cut in a rolling wave between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., and termination emails arrived at 6 a.m. One user who said he worked at an Oracle site in Texas reported discovering the layoff only when his badge failed at the gate and he had to connect to the building's network from outside to retrieve and forward his termination email. Other employees posted that "today is your last working day" amounted to a cold, impersonal message after long tenures, including one who wrote of "24 years as a QA at Oracle and just an impersonal email." These accounts were not independently verified at the time of reporting.

A separate investor take on Oracle's AI position

A Zacks analysis published the same day compared NVIDIA and Oracle as post-earnings AI-stock candidates, arguing that NVIDIA's stronger AI growth, higher return on equity and lower leverage give it an edge over Oracle even as both benefit from rising AI demand. The analysis did not directly address Oracle's layoff announcement.