Oracle told staff on Monday that Monday was their last working day

Oracle began another fresh round of layoffs on Monday. Three affected employees and a copy of the notification email described the round to Business Insider, which reported that staff were told their role had been eliminated “as part of a broader organizational change” and that “today is your last working day”.

Posts from people saying they had been cut appeared throughout the day on LinkedIn, Reddit and Blind.

The timing is not a coincidence, and we saw it coming. On Friday, Oracle disclosed that it had set aside $700m more for restructuring, taking the total reserve to around $2.8bn, and said in its filing that the increase covered “additional actions that we expect to take”.

Those actions started two working days later.

What makes Oracle unusual is not the size of the cuts but their depth. Its workforce shrank by 13 percent in the fiscal year that ended on 31 May, from about 162,000 to 141,000, a reduction of some 21,000 people in twelve months. Monday’s round comes on top of that.

Amazon has cut more people in absolute terms, roughly 57,000 corporate roles since 2022, about 16 percent of its corporate workforce. But that is four years of cutting. Oracle took 13 percent out in one.

At the pace of a single year, no large technology company has gone deeper.

The money freed up has a destination. Oracle reported $28.5bn of capital expenditure in the first quarter, against $8.5bn a year earlier, and has held its fiscal 2027 forecast at $90bn to $95bn.

It spent $55.7bn on data centres in the previous year and has been raising debt to fund the rest. Analysts at TD Cowen put the annual payroll savings from the cuts at $8bn to $10bn, which is a meaningful contribution to a bill of that size but nowhere near covering it.

Roughly two-thirds of Oracle’s 141,000 staff work outside the United States, which raises a question the notification email does not answer.

Under the EU Collective Redundancies Directive, an employer planning large-scale cuts must consult worker representatives in good faith, notify the authorities in writing, and observe a standstill period of at least 30 days before any dismissal takes effect.

A Court of Justice ruling in 2024 held that dismissals made without proper notification are invalid and cannot be cured afterwards. An email telling someone that today is their last working day would not satisfy that process. Whether any European staff received one is not yet known.

Romania is the test case worth watching as Oracle cut about 500 jobs in Romania in June, the second round in under a year at an operation employing around 4,000 people, and the country remains one of its larger European engineering bases.

Oracle did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. The company has not said how many people are affected by this round, which countries they are in, or whether the $2.8bn reserve is now fully committed.

An internal document seen by Business Insider last month indicated the planned reductions ran to double-digit percentages on some teams, which suggests the answer is larger than the three confirmed cases.