Oracle stunned employees on March 31, 2026 when the company announced layoff or around 20,000 employees via email. Oracle started laying off employees across its global offices, with workers in US, India, and other regions reporting termination emails landing in their inboxes as early as 6AM EST. he emails, sent from “Oracle Leadership,” informed employees that their roles had been eliminated as part of a broader organisational change—and that the day they received the email was their last working day. Now a report by TechCrunch details how the laid off employees are fighting with the company for their rights. One of the former Oracle employee told TechCrunch, “I went to sign into the VPN, and it said, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’”
Oralce’s severance terms under fire
Oracle offered laid-off employees around four weeks of pat for the first years of service, along with one additional week per year thereafter, capped at 26 weeks. The severance package also included one most of COBRA insurance. However, employees were also required with sign-in a please waving their rights to sue. The biggest point of contention between Oracle and the laid off employees its no accelerated vesting of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Many workers lost a significant compensation amount tied to the stock grants. As per the TechCrunch report, one long term employee forfeited nearly $1 million in RSUs that were just months away from vesting.
Loopholes on the WARN Act
The report by TechCrunch further added that another shocker was Oracle’s classification of many employees as remote workers, which excluded them from WARN Act protections in states without strong worker provisions. The WARN Act also requires the companies to give 60 days’ notice for mass layoffs affecting 50 or more employees at a single location. By labelling staff as report, Oracle sidestepped these requirements. Some employees also said that they were unaware of their remote classification, despite working hybrid schedules near offices.Even for those covered, Oracle counted WARN Act notice pay within its severance calculation, meaning workers did not receive additional compensation.
Failed negotiations attempts
At least 90 employees signed a petition urging Oracle to match severance terms offered by other tech giants. Competitors like Meta, Microsoft, and Cloudflare provided more generous packages, including accelerated stock vesting and extended healthcare coverage.Oracle, however, declined to negotiate, leaving employees with a take-it-or-leave-it choice. The company has not commented publicly on its severance terms or WARN Act classifications.After 20,000-plus layoffs, how Oracle’s ‘promise’ to Sam Altman is hurting banks across USRecently, it was reported that Oracle is facing a a bank-debt “problem” due to its deal with the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI. This comes as American banks struggle to absorb the scale of financing tied to Oracle’s data centre expansion plans. According to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal, the issue stems from a $300 billion agreement between Oracle and the Sam Altman-led OpenAI, which requires massive borrowing to fund data centres in Texas and Wisconsin. JPMorgan Chase and other US banks have reportedly found it difficult to distribute these loans due to exposure limits linked to a single borrower.The WSJ report cited people familiar with the matter to claim that lenders spent months trying to spread the risk of billions of dollars in loans tied to Oracle-backed data centre projects. Many financial institutions have internal limits on how much exposure they can take to one company, and the scale of Oracle-related borrowing has pushed those limits. As a result, some bank balance sheets became constrained, affecting their ability to finance additional projects linked to Oracle and OpenAI.
