Oracle's Cold 6AM Layoff Emails Hit Staff Amid New Wave of Cuts

aakis33 about 2 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on techtimes.co.uk

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petilon•about 1 hour ago

Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1].

That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2].

All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP.

That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC

coldpie•39 minutes ago

Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.

this_user•4 minutes ago

They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.

petilon•25 minutes ago

Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.

jgalt212•19 minutes ago

That's true, but then again, CNN is a mere husk of its former self. Something needs to change, but maybe it's too late for profit-driven news media.

macintux•6 minutes ago

Not for the employees, obvs. I'm not going to celebrate misery, especially if that misery makes an already-tough job market that much worse.

stuaxo•4 minutes ago

"Dear Santa..."

infamouscow•30 minutes ago

If Sam and Dario manage to kill Oracle, this whole era of software will have been worth it.

jollyllama•26 minutes ago

If it happens in 2026, they will likely be bailed out.

cromka•27 minutes ago

I hope whoever buys their parents, they relicense ZFS

ags16•10 minutes ago

They still maintain Java and Graal VM. That is more that the BS coming out of Misanthropic and ClosedAI.

jgalt212•20 minutes ago

> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business

But it's not if you can jump to the front of the GPU allocation line like Musk has done.

gruez•40 minutes ago

>However, since then the AI hype has evaporated

What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".

petilon•35 minutes ago

That's relative to the hype we had before. Previously any involvement in AI was rewarded heavily, but now it is being punished. Wallstreet previously punished Apple for not enough AI now they are being rewarded for not throwing 100s of billions into AI hardware.

LoganDark•20 minutes ago

Apple still did have to learn what it costs to invest in AI hype marketing, with all the lawsuits about the iPhone 16.

Analemma_•20 minutes ago

I think the parent is overselling it when they say "AI hype has evaporated". Nvidia is still trading high because they're still selling shovels in the gold rush, and the frontier labs are still trading high as well. What is collapsing are the infra providers who are just selling commodities: even if the bubble doesn't crash they will get chewed up, because there is nothing preventing them from being forced to sell at COGS: they have no moat and eventually their margins will be driven to zero.

petilon•16 minutes ago

NVDA P/E is 26. That's hardly overhyped. For comparison AAPL P/E is 38.

lambdaone•40 minutes ago

While I feel sorry for the people involved, Oracle as a company richly deserves this, for reasons far too familiar to everyone here. This is a come-uppance that has been waiting to happen for decades.

jonas21•7 minutes ago

I'm not sure this is really the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle is still worth more than it was all those decades -- it's market cap is larger than it has been at any point in history except the last ~2 years.

rinconrex•42 minutes ago

As someone also freshly laid off (not Oracle though), let me solemnly acknowledge my new cohorts. Best of luck to everyone, it's tough out there. Stay sharp and focused, hoping for the best.

Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?

rf15•about 2 hours ago

I love the smell of [layoff emails] in the morning.

Makes me wonder why they're shedding so much and if Zitron was a little right after all.

bix6•about 1 hour ago

Yeah what’s the end game here? Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…

usrnm•about 1 hour ago

> The latest cuts come after Oracle's workforce fell by roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, during fiscal 2026

13% doesn't seem too different from other tech companies

nerevarthelame•24 minutes ago

The 13% quoted there was from previous layoffs that mostly took place in Q2 of 2026.

This is another 20,000 - 30,000 (the exact number isn't public yet) on top of that.

oblio•33 minutes ago

The difference is that they didn't overhire during Covid.

Ekaros•about 1 hour ago

Well they do have their own interference capacity. So AIs to solve every single issue.

dyauspitr•about 1 hour ago

Morale has been low at oracle for years. Now it’s just a “we pay you and push you as hard as we can for it until you quit” shop.

shawn_w•about 1 hour ago

That's... most jobs.

ramesh31•about 1 hour ago

>" Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…"

...First time?

Oracle is literally the company Dilbert was making fun of

aaronbrethorst•about 1 hour ago

He worked at Pacific Bell between 1986 and June 30, 1995, and the personalities he encountered there inspired many of his Dilbert characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

ags16•9 minutes ago

Banks threatened Larry with a margin call for his $80B loans with stock collateral?

3pm•38 minutes ago

I wonder how this holds up in the age of AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

morkalork•5 minutes ago

If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha

freediddy•about 1 hour ago

I'm confused... Did you expect anything different from Oracle?

Traubenfuchs•33 minutes ago

Stop cheering. Oracle still offers a free arm 4x6GB kubernetes cluster and 2 free amd cpu‘s.

It‘s the best free platform for learners and small scale operations.

yieldcrv•21 minutes ago

the only reason there is compute availability is because devs hate Oracle so much that they don't know about it

an LLM told me about that option when I was seeking out free tiers

jmclnx•about 1 hour ago

>The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts

One of the first things that "progressive" politicians should do if they take power is require large companies to disclose the exact number of firings before people are notified.

czinck•41 minutes ago

That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.

Frieren•about 1 hour ago

This is how it works in Sweden: https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination

"Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement."

Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.

dominotw•about 1 hour ago

Thats how they usually happen ? They are always "cold"

DonHopkins•about 1 hour ago

Unless you're C level, in which case you get promoted to "Vice President in Charge of Looking for a New Job" for a quarter.

mikelitoris•about 1 hour ago

Oh boy here we go again

chasd00•about 1 hour ago

I doubt it was cold as in no prior information cold but more like "cold sounding". If the layoffs affected > 50 employees then it would have triggered the CALWarn act which is the California additions to the federal warn act. So the oracle employees got 60 days notice and have known the email was coming today for 2 months. If they didn't then Oracle owes them 60 days of pay and benefits.

BryantD•about 1 hour ago

The usual way companies handle this is to set the actual layoff date as 60 days from when the email goes out. If you hear about a mass layoff including two months of salary for everyone affected, that’s what’s going on. Typically system access is revoked but the paychecks keep coming as usual and vacation keeps accruing, because you’ve got that extra two months of “employment.” The company also gets the benefit of being able to call you back in if it turns out there was something vital you were doing that never got documented.

This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.