Oracle layoffs: 500+ employees get emails from leadership, calls them 'proposed impacted employee'

Oracle's layoffs have reached Romania again. Starting June 25, the company began notifying roughly 500 employees there that their roles were on the chopping block, with affected staff describing emails headed "COLLECTIVE DISMISSAL - YOU ARE A PROPOSED IMPACTED EMPLOYEE." Oracle hasn't disclosed the scale publicly, but the round follows a pattern its staff elsewhere know well: in earlier US and India cuts, employees described emails from "Oracle Leadership" hitting their inboxes as early as 6AM, with no HR call and no manager warning. For one of Oracle's largest engineering hubs in central and eastern Europe, June 25 marked the day the second axe fell.The tally sits at around 520, according to posts on the r/employeesOfOracle subreddit, where affected staff traded details within hours of the first emails. That lands on a Romanian operation of roughly 4,000 people, and it is the second such sweep there in under a year. The pace is what rattled even those left standing, with whole teams reportedly wiped in a single morning.Oracle's second round of Romania cuts was planned months agoThis was not a snap decision. A former Oracle employee, speaking to Ziarul Financiar, said the latest cuts were part of a restructuring mapped out in the previous fiscal year, with the list of names drawn up as far back as spring. The company had already let go of about 400 Romanian staff in late 2025—then the largest restructuring in its history—so the June round lands on an operation still raw from the first.The cut reaches across the business rather than one corner of it. The lines of business flagged as potentially impacted span Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Database Technologies, One Oracle EMEA, Industries Applications, Oracle Health & Analytics, Customer Success Services, Fusion Applications Development & Support, General & Administrative, and Other Technology Groups—a spread that takes in core engineering, support, and back-office roles alike.The mechanics, as described by employees online, were clinical. The emails went out individually rather than as one mass notice, sent from HR with managers copied in and documents attached. The "proposed" wording left some unsure whether the decision was final, with one poster noting affected staff could try to "negotiate" their case. Because the notices were staggered, employees who hadn't heard by midday weren't necessarily safe. Slack and internal accounts, several noted, were still active even for those already told.Severance, by workers' accounts, runs to roughly one month's pay per year worked, plus around three compensatory salaries and two months of garden leave—broadly in line with the earlier Romanian round. As one employee put it, the cuts weren't performance-driven but the cost of the company's AI bet. The dread is what lingers: the former employee who spoke to Ziarul Financiar warned more adjustments could follow.The numbers behind the building in BucharestOracle's three main Romanian entities employed 4,288 people at the end of 2025, according to finance ministry filings. Revenue there actually grew—combined sales of about 1.79 billion lei in 2025, up 7.5% on the year. Yet the same entities slipped into a combined net loss of 34.8 million lei after a small profit in 2024. Rising revenue, shrinking headcount: the contradiction sits at the heart of why these jobs went.Romania built much of its tech economy on exactly this kind of work—the engineering and support functions multinationals park where skilled labour is cheaper. Those are the functions an AI-driven reorganisation reaches first, which is why the country's large tech-services sector is so exposed to decisions made in California.The Romanian cuts are a small tributary of a much larger river. Oracle's global headcount fell to about 141,000 by the end of May 2026, down from 162,000 a year earlier—a drop of nearly 13%, funded by a data centre build-out the company is partly paying for by cutting payroll. For the people in Bucharest, though, the cut was not a line in a filing. It was a notice with their name on it—and on the former employee's account, spring's list may not be the last.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.