Oracle Hits Staff With Third Round of 6 AM Layoff Emails as AI Spending Hits $28.5 Billion

Oracle employees across the US, India, Canada and, for the first time, Mexico got the same brutal wake-up call on Monday, September 14: a 6 a.m. email telling them their job was gone, effective that day.

The message, signed "Oracle Leadership" and 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 organisational change. As a result, today is your last working day."

It's the same script Oracle ran in March, when more than 10,000 employees across the US, India and Canada got an identical email at an identical hour, according to Startup Fortune. Employees who lived through both rounds told Business Insider and posted on Reddit's r/employeesOfOracle forum that the technical sequence was nearly identical too. Federated logins stopped working around 4 a.m. Eastern, Slack sessions dropped in a rolling wave between 5 and 5:30 a.m., office badges failed, and then the email landed at 6 a.m. sharp, according to accounts cited by Times of India and time.news.

The Numbers So Far

Oracle has not disclosed how many people were cut in the September 14 round. But the company disclosed in a regulatory filing that it widened its fiscal 2026 restructuring plan by roughly $700 million, pushing the total projected cost to nearly $2.8 billion, up from about $2.1 billion already booked through August 31, according to Startup Fortune.

That's on top of a fiscal 2026 that already saw Oracle's headcount fall by about 21,000 people, or 13%, leaving the company with roughly 141,000 workers worldwide, down from about 162,000 a year earlier, according to NDTV and Yahoo Finance. Oracle spent about $1.84 billion on severance and restructuring costs during that fiscal year.

TD Cowen analysts estimate the cuts could ultimately reach 20,000 to 30,000 positions, or as much as 18% of Oracle's global workforce, before the restructuring cycle ends, per Startup Fortune and time.news. That figure is an analyst projection, not a number Oracle has confirmed.

A Quiet Round That Wasn't

Oracle's cuts didn't arrive on a predictable schedule. Startup Fortune reported that a widely expected wave around September 1 never materialized as a formal announcement. Instead, employees watched Oracle's internal Slack membership count quietly slide, from 150,198 to 150,181 within days, then down again to 150,113 soon after. By September 4, vice presidents tied to Oracle's Application Labs had disappeared from org charts with no formal notice, Startup Fortune reported. The company-wide blast returned on September 14.

On that day, Times of India reported Slack membership dropped by roughly 3,000 to 4,000 people through the morning as workers posted their teams one after another: OCI security, CI/CD, enterprise engineering, observability, executive escalations, Fusion, NetSuite sales, Customer Success Services, Oracle Health, EPM, HR Technology, data center compliance, and the Stargate site in Abilene, Texas.

Michael Shepherd, a senior Oracle manager who kept his job, wrote on LinkedIn that the reductions targeted senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers and technical specialists rather than underperformers, according to time.news. Times of India reported that performance ratings offered no protection. One employee in HR Technology, rated an IC4, had posted four straight ratings of 4 and 5 out of 5 before being cut.

The Business Case Oracle Is Making

Oracle's official line, repeated in the termination email itself, is that this is a "broader organisational change," not a performance action against any individual. The company has attributed its fiscal 2026 cuts to a mix of restructuring, performance issues, strategic shifts and acquisitions, plus AI adoption, according to Yahoo Finance.

The spending numbers back up the AI framing. Oracle spent $28.5 billion on capital expenditure in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, more than three times the $8.5 billion it spent in the same quarter a year earlier, according to NDTV. Oracle has kept its full-year capex forecast at $90 billion to $95 billion and said it signed more than $30 billion in additional AI cloud contracts during the quarter. That buildout isn't free. Oracle reported negative free cash flow of $5.4 billion for the quarter, per NDTV. Fiscal 2025 revenue was $57 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.

A reasonable read of that math is that Oracle is trying to fund a massive AI infrastructure bet by trimming payroll elsewhere, a tradeoff plenty of companies chasing the AI buildout are making. The counterargument, made by the affected workers themselves in the Reddit threads cited by Times of India and time.news, is that strong performance reviews and years of tenure offered no shield. A company sitting on tens of billions in fresh AI contracts chose 6 a.m. emails and immediate system lockouts over face-to-face notice or a transition period.

Oracle has not commented publicly on the September 14 round, according to Times of India. The company also has not said whether the September cuts are the last wave of this restructuring cycle or whether TD Cowen's 20,000-to-30,000 estimate will prove accurate. Oracle's stock closed down 3.07% on September 14, according to Yahoo Finance, though no source has tied that specific move to the layoffs rather than broader market conditions.