Employees at tech giant Oracle are facing down a fresh round of layoffs this month, the latest bad news out of an industry that’s either booming or brutal, depending on who you ask.
The company has yet to publicly confirm the new cuts to its workforce, but state data shows that Oracle is reducing its Seattle-area workforce by 101 employees. The layoffs were filed with Washington state on September 2 and will go into effect by November 3.
While state filings only reflect Seattle area jobs lost for now, Oracle employees in other states shared news of the their jobs being cut on Linkedin. In some instances, newly laid off employees worked for the company for 20 years, so the round of reductions may not have solely impacted more recent hires.
Oracle workers based in Massachusetts, Texas and Kansas were among those who said their positions were eliminated as part of a workforce reduction. On anonymous message boards, some Oracle employees reported seeing the company’s general Slack channel drop by around 3,500 members in the last 24 hours, but no official numbers have yet confirmed the scope of the latest layoffs.
Some states make layoff data public through a kind of law known as a mini-WARN Act, which stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. The laws are designed to provide workers with advance notice of mass layoffs and often collect that information into state databases. California also operates a WARN database, but it did not include new Oracle layoffs at the time of writing. Fast Company reached out to Oracle to confirm the layoffs, but has not received a response from the company.
Multiple rounds of layoffs
Oracle also cut jobs last month. In mid-August, the company notified the state that it planned to eliminate 289 positions in the Bay Area across its offices in Pleasanton, Redwood City and Santa Clara. In the same flurry of layoffs, Oracle planned to reduce its workforce by 161 positions in the Seattle area, where the company employs around 4,000 workers. The company has been conspicuously reducing its office footprint in Seattle over the last year.
Oracle’s employees are facing uncertainty as their employer trims its massive workforce, but the company itself is having a banner year. The enterprise hardware and software provider notched its best week since 2001 over the summer, with shares peaking at a record high above $250 last month.
In its June earnings call, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison marveled at spiking demand for the company’s products. Even as it pours billions into cloud and AI infrastructure, Oracle is apparently still scrambling to keep pace with its happy customers.
“The demand is astronomical,” Ellison said. “But we have to do this methodically. The reason demand continues to outstrip supply is we can only build these data centers, build these computers, so fast.”
