When Akanksha woke up in her flat in Bengaluru around 7 am on March 31, the first thing she did was check her email. This had become a routine ever since the 24-year-old, who requested that only her first name be used, started working with a US-based team at Oracle. But instead of the usual exchanges, there was an email from the company saying there would be an important update. Within an hour, her access to the company Slack channel was cut. When she reached out to her manager, she was told that she, along with 40% of her team, were being let go of.

“I didn’t think I’d be laid off – I was the only developer working on a feature that was important for the client,” says Akanksha, who hails from Jharkhand and had joined the tech company three years ago straight out of IIT Roorkee. 

Around the same time, Akhilesh Sharma, who was working remotely for Oracle from his hometown in Himachal, was trying unsuccessfully to log in to start his work. Assuming it might be an issue with his VPN, he checked his inbox, only to find an e-mail similar to what Akanksha had received. It was when he reached out to his manager that the picture became clear – that he was being laid off.

“Ironically, I woke up that day thinking that this is a good company and I should stay for 4-5 years,” says the 28-year-old software engineer.

Akanksha and Akhilesh are among the 10,000 to 12,000 Oracle employees in India and an estimated 30,000 globally who lost their jobs on March 31. The US-headquartered company, which had over 1,60,000 employees as of May 2025, has not officially commented on the job cuts. But in early March, Bloomberg reported that the company, headed by tech mogul Larry Ellison, was planning to cut thousands of jobs as part of efforts to deal with the cash crunch brought on by its huge investments in artificial intelligence (AI) data centres. At least some of these cuts would be in roles the company expects it will need less of due to AI, according to the report.

In India, the retrenchment package includes two months’ salary, an additional 15 days’ pay for every year at the company, and Rs 20,000 as medical insurance premium, apart from gratuity, etc.

But Akhilesh said the bigger blow was losing out on encashing the Rs 10 lakh of employee stock options (Esops) he held, since he was being let go before completing a year. In the time he was there, some others in his team had already been laid off, so this was not entirely unsurprising. But it was still unsettling.

“I was there only for 8 months so it affects me less. But I heard of someone who was laid off after being with Oracle for 17 years. The layoffs may make sense from a business point of view, but think about it from a humanitarian point,” he says on the phone, a few days after the announcement.

The Oracle layoffs stand out for the scale – but they are also part of a series of job cuts at tech companies, globally and in India, that have been taking place over the last couple of years and are at least partly tied to the inexorable march of AI.

On Thursday, April 23, Meta announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce globally, translating to about 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles as the social media giant ramps up investments in AI. The same day, Microsoft announced its first ever voluntary buyouts for employees in the US.

Closer home, TCS, India’s largest IT services firm, had announced in mid-2025 that it was shrinking its workforce by 2% that financial year, translating to about 12,200 jobs. Its peer Infosys terminated the contract of hundreds of trainees, a move which attracted the scrutiny of Karnataka’s Labour Department. One report estimated that India’s top five IT companies, the flagbearers of its $300-billion IT outsourcing industry, saw net hiring – the number of employee additions minus the number let go of – of just 17 in the first nine months of FY26. This is a sliver of the almost 18,000 net hires in the same period a year ago. More recently, Wipro stated during its fourth quarter FY26 results that it does not have a fresher hiring target for the next financial year, compared with its recruitment of 7,500 new employees from campuses a year ago.

“Will AI replace me” has become both a talking point and source of concern ever since Open AI’s viral release of ChatGPT in November 2022, giving rise to terms like ‘jobscalypse’ and ‘AI-mageddon’. Three years later, some of the talk around entire professions getting replaced appears to have been more hype than reality – at least as of now. And the huge swathes of job cuts in tech cannot be attributed to AI alone. But it’s also becoming increasingly evident that the tech and IT sector in India, which used to hire lakhs of graduates and........

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