Oracle laid off approximately 12,000 employees in India on March 31, 2026, as part of a global restructuring that is estimated to have affected between 20,000 and 30,000 employees worldwide. This amounts to roughly 18% of the company’s total workforce of approximately 1,62,000.
Employees across India, the United States, Canada, and Mexico seemingly received termination emails sent under the name “Oracle Leadership” at 6 AM local time. The emails informed employees that their roles had been eliminated as part of an organisational change and that the day of the email was their final working day.
Access to company systems was cut simultaneously. There was no prior conversation with managers or HR. Two people impacted by the retrenchment, including one from Oracle’s human resources department, told Business Standard that a second round of layoffs in India is expected within a month.
The severance package being offered in India reportedly includes 15 days’ salary for each year of service, notice pay, leave encashment, gratuity where applicable, and an additional two-month salary top-up. However, the latter is contingent on voluntary resignation.
The cuts are part of what Oracle has described internally as an organisational restructuring. In its most recent quarterly filing, the company indicated it had raised the estimated cost of its fiscal 2026 restructuring plan to $2.1 billion, with $982 million already booked by 28 February.
Most of these costs, Oracle stated, stem from employee severance. The company has committed to approximately $50 billion in capital expenditure for fiscal 2026, largely directed at building out AI data centre infrastructure. Investment bank TD Cowen has estimated that the job cuts will free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in annual cash flow to support that expansion.
Oracle India currently employs approximately 30,000 people, including those affected by the latest round. The scale of what happened on 31 March, and the manner in which it was communicated, has drawn sharp reactions across Indian tech and HR circles. The 6 AM email and simultaneous system lockout are emerging as a widely discussed example of large-scale offboarding handled without individual managerial conversations.
The restructuring comes as the broader technology sector continues to reduce headcount in response to rising AI investment and shifting workforce strategies. Companies including Amazon, Meta, and Epic Games have also announced job cuts in 2026. Within India’s IT services ecosystem, which has already seen restructuring at firms including TCS and Cognizant over the past two years, the Oracle cuts represent one of the largest single-day layoffs by a multinational in recent memory.
