Oracle has quietly begun another round of quiet, unannounced layoffs as it looks to trim its costs.
While the scope and scale of the layoffs isn't yet clear, some in the database giant's North America Cloud Infrastructure & Technology (NACT) unit received notification that their jobs had been cut earlier on Monday, according to internal emails viewed by Insider. Posts on the anonymous web forum TheLayoff.com and on LinkedIn also include messages from some employees who say they were laid off on Monday.
Some employees affected by the cuts now have until Monday, October 31st to find a new role with the company, the messages show. However, at least one now-former employee tells Insider that they were given notice that their employment with Oracle would come to an end the following Monday. That person asked to remain anonymous to preserve their future career prospects.
Oracle did not comment for this story at the time of publication.
As Insider recently reported, morale at Oracle has been particularly low since August, when the company quietly performed a widespread layoff that may have impacted thousands of jobs across the world.
Oracle's NACT unit, headed by executive vice president Mark Hura, is the organization that encompasses many of the tech titan's cloud efforts, including its cloud database and applications. Importantly, NACT is distinct from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), a separate organization led by executive VP Clay Magouyrk. It's not clear if OCI, the tech titan's strategically-critical competitor to market leader Amazon Web Services, is also experiencing layoffs.
The job cuts, combined with a wave of new hiring restrictions that went into place in September, had some within and around the company worry that more mass layoffs were imminent. Those restrictions, including a strong preference for hiring outside of pricey tech hubs like San Francisco or Seattle, come as the company looks to control costs in the wake of its $28.3 billion acquisition of medical records database company Cerner.
In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Oracle indicated that it expects to incur $519 million in restructuring costs through the end of its current fiscal year in the August of 2023. The filing says that those costs are "primarily related to employee severance."
"They just spent a lot of money on Cerner — somewhere along the way they need to tighten the belt to recoup," an Oracle recruiter previously told Insider.
