The dark shadow of recession and restructuring that has been prevailing in the global tech world for the last few months has once again deepened. The sudden large-scale layoff in Oracle, one of the world's largest companies in database and cloud infrastructure, has shaken the entire IT industry. Like normal days, when the employees woke up in the morning and were preparing to start their work shift, a message from the company leadership arrived in their personal and official inbox which shook them to the ground. Without any prior notice, performance warning or farewell meeting, the employees were directly informed that today was their last working day in the company. This sudden decision not only created chaos in the corporate offices in America, but also made the heartbeats of thousands of tech professionals working in big IT hubs of India like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Noida and Gurugram faster. Everyone is now worried about whether this series of layoffs is going to spread to Indian offices as well. Login closed at 4 a.m., Slack disappeared at 5:30 a.m., and then came the dreaded message at 6 a.m. The method of layoffs was so dramatic and unexpected that employees didn't even get a chance to recover. Several employees shared their ordeal on social media platforms LinkedIn, Reddit's r/employeesOfOracle forum and professional community app 'Blind', saying the incident had begun in the early hours. From around 4 am in the morning, corporate logins and VPN connections of employees started failing automatically. Just an hour later, between 5 and 5:30 in the morning, the accounts of hundreds of employees started automatically disconnecting from the team communication app Slack. The electronic entry badges of the employees who had reached the office stopped working at the main entrance of the office. After this, at exactly 6 in the morning, the much-discussed email was sent by 'Oracle Leadership', in which it was written in very cold words – 'We are sharing some difficult decisions regarding your current situation. In view of the company's extensive organizational restructuring and business needs, it has been decided to terminate your role. As a result, today is your last working day.' Even performance rating did not help: 24 year old seniors and top performers are also out. It is often believed in the corporate world that the burden of retrenchment falls on low performing employees, but this latest decision of Oracle has completely demolished this notion. According to statements surfaced on social media, those fired include professionals who had recently received excellent performance ratings. A senior IC-4 level employee in the HR technology division, who was consistently receiving excellent ratings, was also shown the door. At the same time, developers who have been working in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for the last four years and have never received a rating below average were also not spared. The most shocking case came to light of a senior Quality Assurance (QA) engineer who had been serving the company for 24 years, who was dismissed from the company through a simple email without any farewell. Apart from this, new engineers who joined the Stargate Project located in Abilene, Texas just a few months ago have also been affected by this layoff. The biggest hit to core departments like cloud, security and health tech According to internal reports shared by employees, almost all major departments of Oracle have been affected by this layoff. The greatest impact has been seen on OCI Security, CI/CD Pipeline, Enterprise Engineering, Observability, Executive Escalation, and Fusion ERP teams. Additionally, hundreds of employee IDs from NetSuite Sales, Customer Success Services, Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), EPM and HR Technology were also deactivated in one fell swoop. Discussions on Reddit claimed that within a few hours of the morning the company's internal Slack network had lost about 3,000 to 4,000 active users. However, Oracle management has not yet issued any public press release in this regard nor disclosed the exact total number of laid-off employees, further increasing the internal uncertainty. Indiscriminate expenditure of billions of dollars on AI vs. sacrifices of employees. The biggest reason behind this continuous layoff in Oracle is believed to be the company's rapid shift towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data center infrastructure. If we look at the company's recent financial data, a big contradiction emerges. Oracle has made a huge capital expenditure (CapEx) of $ 28.5 billion (about Rs 2.4 lakh crore) on its network expansion and data centers in the first quarter of FY 2027, which is more than three times compared to $ 8.5 billion spent in the same period last year. The company's estimated capital expenditure for the entire financial year is between $90 to $95 billion. Not only this, the company has received new AI cloud contracts worth more than $30 billion and its future revenue backlog has increased to a record level of $664 billion. But due to this indiscriminate capital expansion, the company's free cash flow has become negative by $5.4 billion. Simply put, the company is burning money to build giant data centers with AI models and Nvidia GPU chips, and thousands of employees' jobs are being sacrificed to offset this huge financial burden and losses. Fear in India's IT sector: Will the centers of Bengaluru and Hyderabad be the next target? After this wave of layoffs in American operations is completed, now the next big threat is looming over the employees working in India. According to tech experts and past layoff patterns, whenever there is a restructuring at the US headquarters, a round of cutbacks in India and EMEA regions starts soon after. Employees at Oracle's 'India Development Centers' (IDC), which are mainly spread across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Noida and Chennai, are currently in a state of great confusion and fear. According to industry sources, about 3,000 to 4,000 employees in India and about 30 percent of the customer support teams are facing layoffs. In the previous round in March also, Indian employees were excluded under a similar formula. The hiring market for freshers and mid-level engineers is already slow in India, so if a big brand like Oracle lays off people from Indian offices on a large scale, it will have a direct impact on the country's domestic tech employment scenario. After being fired from the job, the biggest challenge faced by the employees is that the access to their official laptop, email and company database was immediately cut off. In the email sent to the employees, strict instructions were given that they should not copy, forward or download any confidential data of the company. Along with this, they were asked to immediately submit a personal email ID on which documents and links for document signing (DocuSign) could be sent. Many employees have alleged that they were locked out of the system before even knowing the terms of the detailed severance package. However, according to initial information, the four-year-old employee of the database organization has been offered a severance package of about 7 weeks, whereas the 'N+2' (compensation fixed according to years of service) formula was implemented earlier in India. Despite this, the cancellation of unvested stock options (RSUs) and the stress of finding a new job in a declining job market have become an unbearable mental and economic blow to the affected families.
