'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree
WARN filings in two states show 1,000+ layoffs, but wider cuts remain unconfirmed
By his third failed attempt to log into Oracle’s VPN on Tuesday morning, a decades-long employee of the company started to get a bad feeling.
When Slack stopped responding too, the feeling got worse. Then he checked his email and discovered that he was one of the estimated thousands of Oracle employees who had received a message saying that their services were no longer required.
“Basically it said 'Thank you. Go (expletive) yourself,'” he told The Register.
The Register is not identifying the employee since he fears that publicly discussing his termination could adversely affect a separation package that he has not yet received any information about.
Oracle has not commented on the number of workers it laid off on Tuesday. It declined to comment to The Register on Tuesday and Wednesday.
It was AI, the decades-long Oracle employee said, that took his job and it will take more jobs. But he said AI’s ability to replace humans is limited to the companies that can incorporate it into workflows, which he only sees happening at large enterprises.
“It's not coming for the entire American economy,” he said. “It will come for the big guys. You need to have solid orchestration and automation in place and, in the end, you still need to tell it what to do, for now.”
Oracle cut at least 491 jobs in Washington, according to a WARN notice filed in that state, which said all laid off workers would be separated by June 1. In a 31-page attachment, it listed the jobs cut. Many were software developers and project managers.
In Missouri, 539 Oracle workers were cut in Kansas City, according to a WARN notice filed there. Those layoffs accounted for more than half of the state’s 1,021 jobs lost so far this year.
The cuts appear to be part of Oracle’s fiscal 2026 restructuring plan, first valued at up to $1.6 billion in September 2025 and later raised to $2.1 billion in March. Oracle recorded $415 million in restructuring expense in the same quarter Bloomberg reported layoffs in its cloud division.
It is not clear how many workers were affected on Tuesday, though a screenshot and Reddit posts purporting to show internal Slack user counts suggested a drop of about 10,000 overnight. The cuts echo a TD Cowen forecast earlier this year, when the investment bank questioned how Oracle would finance its expanding AI datacenter buildout and suggested headcount reductions could reach 20,000 to 30,000.
“I’m not surprised. It’s corporate America,” the longtime Oracle worker told The Register. “I wasn’t lured in by the high salaries or the great benefits. The benefits were great. But I’m someone who carries my laptop with me all the time and, if there is a problem that I’m working on, I don’t care if it is the weekend or Christmas, I’m going to work on that problem until it’s solved.”
That initiative had carried him through his decades at Oracle as he saw the company grow exponentially from its roots in the database to embrace cloud and now become an important piece of the AI fabric that is taking over technology.
He said as Oracle grew, he watched his own fortunes grow with it.
“I've been Uncle Larry’s biggest fan,” he said, referring to Oracle cofounder, chairman, and CTO Larry Ellison. “I’ve seen stories about toxic work culture, but I never experienced it.”
He said he wasn’t upset that he didn’t get a phone call to deliver the bad news.
“When you are cutting that many people, it sort of makes sense,” he said. “I’m glad I’m near the end of my career and I don’t have kids to worry about.” ®