News that an estimated 30,000 employees are losing their jobs at Oracle comes at a time that the company is claiming to have $533bn in orders to fulfil.
As of May 2025, the company had a workforce of around 165 million employees. Its latest quarterly earnings filing shows that the Oracle expects revenue of $67bn and capital expenditures of $50bn for 2026, which it stated is unchanged from its previous financial guidance.
For 2027, its financial guidance forecasts revenue of $90bn. Neither the latest quarterly earnings filing nor the subsequent earnings call with financial analysts revealed any changes to headcount.
Yet, in a widely reported LinkedIn post, Micheal Shepherd, an AI operations lead at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), reposted messages from several colleagues at the company who said they have been made redundant in the latest round of job cuts.
One post, from a security alert manager at Oracle, sums up the situation, stating: “Many of the absolute best colleagues were laid off as well. It seems layoffs follow an algorithm of high-level individual contributors and mid-level managers – especially those with outstanding stock options.”
A post from a former employee – responsible for managing a team to ensure Oracle products and services offered by the business comply with standards such as PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – described the layoffs as “unprecedented”.
A former principal staff engineer posted: “I have quite a few friends who were laid off today. Top performers, extremely talented and really solid at their job. They just got caught up in a wave.”
Another, who describes himself as a founding engineer at OCI’s File Storage Service, said he has handled “countless on-call shifts and solved countless problems under pressure”, during his tenure at Oracle.
The posts include people with job roles such as service operations engineer, software development architect and software development manager.
While these LinkedIn posts represent just a small snapshot of the job losses at the tech giant, they illustrate that the job cuts have affected senior people, involved closely in product development, security and regulatory compliance.
At the time of writing, Computer Weekly had not received a response from Oracle about how the job cuts would affect its customers and product development.
Is AI behind the headcount reduction?
During the company’s Q3 FY26 earnings call in March, the company reported cloud infrastructure revenue of $4.9bn, up 84%. At the time, Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia spoke about AI helping the company to deliver software quicker.
“The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly,” he said. “We are building brand-new SaaS [software as a service] products using AI, and embedding AI agents right into our existing applications suites.”
Sicilia’s sentiment on the role of AI was recently mirrored by Steve Miranda during his recent appearance at the Oracle AI Tour London event. When discussing people’s role in enterprise resource planning software, he suggested AI can replace certain tasks. At the time, Miranda said: “Nobody is in business to run ERP. The more we can save them on the ERP side, the more they invest in what they do.”
While its executive leadership team clearly has ambitions to deploy AI automation in roles previously achieved by humans, Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder believes the company’s decision to cut jobs is more focused on improving the company’s share price.
“When AI replaces employees, an organisation has a vetted, proven and deployed AI solution that can do the job of the employees who lost their jobs,” he said. “That is to say, the work done by a human before the layoffs is being done by AI the day after the layoff.
“This is rare; even big tech firms don’t have mature AI agents that can take on the myriad tasks of dozens of different types of jobs that get eliminated. With Oracle, there are financial pressures to lay off staff – the company’s stock has fallen by more than 50% since Q3 2025.”
What this may point to is the financial markets being more cautious about Oracle’s ability to execute its AI strategy, especially as the company recently announced it would be seeking to raise $50bn in 2026 using a combination of debt and equity financing.