American technology giant Oracle undertook “significant” job cuts on Wednesday (AEDT), with thousands of employees laid off.
Social media posts by impacted workers, seen by Information Age, suggest employees have been let go in countries such as the United States, India, and Brazil.
Oracle declined to comment when asked how many roles were cut, and whether any were based in Australia.
The company, which sells software and hardware for cloud infrastructure and databases, is one of the largest public firms in the world, with a market capitalisation of around $US418 billion ($600 billion).
Michael Shepherd, a senior operations manager at Oracle, wrote on LinkedIn that the company had “conducted a significant reduction in force”.
Shepherd said many of the laid-off workers were “senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, government and sovereign cloud environments, and enterprise-scale systems”.
“Let me be direct: this was not a performance action,” he said.
“The individuals affected were not let go because of anything they did or didn’t do.”
Outgoing Oracle employee Nina Lewis suggested on LinkedIn that “30,000 or so" workers had been laid off, but other reports have suggested the number may be closer to 10,000.
'Fired at 5am by an email’
Sacked Oracle employees in the US took to social media to say they received an email about their redundancies early on Tuesday morning, local time.
The email, published by Business Insider, reportedly stated in part, “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.
“We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.”
Outgoing employee Denise Mitzit wrote on LinkedIn, “I sincerely hope to stay in touch with the old gang and in spite of being fired at 5am by an email with some questionable font sizes for my name (like a mass mailer from 1987), I do hope that the good people remaining find every success!”
Impacted Oracle engineer Gary Olmsted wrote, “This morning I woke up to my Slack being disconnected and a nice email telling me my position had been eliminated.
“I know this was part of a large layoff here, but it is hard not to take personally.”
Technical product manager Dan Itkis wrote that he was “not convinced" Oracle had shown affected employees “dignity and consideration for the transition”.
Oracle using AI to build software ‘with fewer people’
Oracle said in March that AI coding tools had been “become so efficient that we have been restructuring our product development teams into smaller, more agile and productive groups”.
“This new AI Code Generation technology is enabling us to build more software in less time with fewer people,” the firm said.
“Oracle is now building more SaaS [Software as a Service] applications for more industries at a lower cost.
“AI code generation is making our SaaS application suites more competitive and more profitable.”
Other technology companies which have also recently announced layoffs while increasing their use of AI include the likes of Amazon, Atlassian, Block, WiseTech, Pinterest, Meta, and HP.
Like other SaaS providers, Oracle is facing competition from AI software companies, and its share price has dropped around 50 per cent over the last six months amid investor concerns about its significant AI infrastructure spending.
The firm is contributing to the $US500 billion ($720 billion) Stargate AI project in the US, and announced in February that it expected to raise up to $US50 billion ($72 billion) in 2026 to build more cloud infrastructure to keep up with AI demand.
It also launched its first Australian-based AI Customer Excellence Centre in Sydney in March.
Strong demand for AI cloud capacity would allow Oracle to “comfortably meet and likely exceed” its revenue growth rate forecast for fiscal year 2027 “and beyond”, the company suggested last month.
