The Austin, Texas-based company disclosed in an annual regulatory filing earlier this year that its total workforce decreased by roughly 21,000 employees from 2025, costing the company roughly $2.1 billion mostly through severance packages and contract terminations.
Those cuts affected 741 Seattle-area employees between August 2025 and March, which, coupled with this week’s layoffs, means 1,100 Oracle workers in Seattle have been let go since last summer.
In a quarterly regulatory filing, Oracle addressed its 2026 restructuring plan and said it took further action after the fiscal year ended on Aug. 31, costing an additional $700 million and causing this week’s layoffs.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
9 Comments
bitteroldcoot@piefed.social · 8 pts · 2d
For those who didn't know it, oracle is in trouble.
Their bonds have been cut to near junk status as they tried to compete with the other hyper-scalers. The Ellisons leverage the company to buy paramount and now Warner. Then the Warner merger went to hell and they are bleeding cash. While everything they do at paramount loses them money.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 2d
And they're doing it with promises of OpenAI money. Of all the large AI model companies, I see OpenAI is at the most risk.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech · 8 pts · 2d
Oracle is circling the drain. On one hand I hate to see layoffs, but on the other... when was the last time Oracle was relevant. And not just in a "haha oracle bad" but seriously, any time Oracle is mentioned in the tech world it's about how people are trying to migrate off of Oracle - or how Oracle has made it incredibly difficult to do so. If a company is altering their entire business plan on how to force you to stay - not just dark patterns but actual contracts and SLA requirements, you know they're desperate.
Hell their move to "Oracle Java" and trying to close out the open Java ecosystem was so negatively received for the same reasons that we saw massive waves of rewrites trying to get everything away from Java. I'm pretty sure that's why we saw Microsoft completely 180 on C# and went full open source.
Oracle has done everything in it's power to shoot itself in the foot. Refuse to innovate, attempt to push new walls and boundaries to how you use their products, jack up prices, and companies are sick of it. They have a shit name, and no software architect in their right mind would ever use Oracle products now.
Hell, if I was interviewing a software candidate and they seriously told me in their interview that they would use Oracle, I'm pretty sure that would tell me they shouldn't be hired even. The company has that bad of a reputation.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 2d
Morally perhaps, but revenue wise Oracle is still increasing its profitability in its core business. Here's the relevant excerpt from Oracle's the June 10-K filing. Red circled is 2025 revenue and Blue circled is 2026. They grew total revenue $10 billion in a year.
If you're thinking of Oracle's (small and medium sized) database business and Java licensing as falling out favor, I think you're right. However, thats not where Oracle makes much of its money these days. I also think you're right when you say folks are migrating away for small and medium sized DBs. The cost for using Oracle DB on-prem is usually not worth it. Really good open source DB software like MySQL (MariaDB) or Postgres can handle that load with a tiny fraction of the operational costs. Additionally big enterprise customers are using cloud services from MS, AWS, and GCP for managed database solutions for those sized workloads.
However, on the big DB side Exadata is still in use and I'm not seeing companies migrate away from it. Oracle's big revenue drivers these days is big enterprise EPM and ERP software as well as Oracle cloud hosting contracts. Additionally, OpenAI bought up nearly every spare CPU in Oracle Cloud to expand its GPT hosted offerings. Its risky though because OpenAI is paying Oracle with other people's money, so if OpenAI's money dries up, Oracle is going to be left with massively huge unpaid bills.
I think I may be the same age as you are, but Oracle buying Sun Microsystems and what Oracle did with Java is lots of ancient history. Yes a few years ago there was an additional squeeze on existing Oracle Java licensees, but like you said (and I agree with) lots of companies moved away from Java more than a decade ago. An entire generation of new IT professionals has been born, grew up, learned IT, and have no memory of the this debacle of the Sun purchase.
The huge risk to Oracle is the gamble they're taking on OpenAI. Oracle is dumping MASSIVE amounts of borrowed money into a big datacenter build out and they're doing it with a promise from OpenAI that they'll buy up the hosting capacity. Oracle is getting its money buy issuing corporate bonds. Oracle's bond rating has dropped to a horrible BBB- rating. One more drop and its considered "junk bonds".
If the AI bubble pops in the next year or so, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will feel a sting, but move on. Oracle will collapse and fall over dead.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 2d
Kind of... MySQL is really not comparable to Postgres, at least as MySQL is generally used. It's commonly set up to sacrifice ACID properties in favor of performance. When configured to go as full ACID as it can, its performance and robustness are inferior to Postgres. MySQL/Maria is great in its little niche, though. And I suppose the same could be said about Mongo.
From your lips to God's ears.
specialseaweed@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 23h
I was forced to use Oracle's 10g in college. That was my only interaction with Oracle and I'll still hate them as long as I live. I'm rooting for OpenAI to blow up just to screw Oracle.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 2d
Ditching Oracle DB is relatively straightforward: just migrate to PostgreSQL. PG's admin tools aren't as idiot-proof, but the DB itself is just fine. I've led several projects to do just that, and they all went smoothly and gave good ROI.
Migrating off Oracle's ERP, on the other hand, is a costly, risky pain in the ass, and there aren't many other places to jump: SAP in some sectors, Microsoft's joke of an ERP system in some others (generally SMB). That's Ellison's real cash cow.
My team has a sizeable Java codebase to maintain, we only use open-source Java tooling to keep it alive. But I don't know anyone in the past decade who'd give serious thought to using Java for a greenfield implementation.
Then there's their substandard cloud offering. Ewww.
Textbook oligopolist rent-seeking. You can feed off the rotting corpse of your products for a very long time if you follow that strategy. Look at Adobe or Salesforce. Lock 'em in, then bleed 'em dry.
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 2d
velma@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 3d
Non-paywall link