Oracle layoffs: The ‘6 am email’ didn’t come on September 1, and employees across US and India are now ‘watching’ Slack counts

At 6 am on September 1, thousands of Oracle employees checked their inboxes and found nothing. That silence is what the company’s workforce is talking about now. The date had taken on a life of its own inside Oracle, not because the company announced anything, but because Business Insider reported in mid-August that managers had been asked to draw up lists of affected staff, with the aim of lowering payroll before Oracle’s second fiscal quarter opened on September 1. The report, citing people familiar with the plans and an internal document, said reductions on some teams could run into double-digit percentages. Employees did the rest of the arithmetic themselves, drawing on the memory of March 31, when termination emails from “Oracle Leadership” landed at roughly 6 am local time and told recipients that the same day was their last working day.So instead of an announcement, there is a countdown that keeps resetting.