As widely reported, Oracle eliminated an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 positions via email on March 31. One affected employee described the moment they realized what had happened: "I went to sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack.’ And she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’"

The individual soon received an email stating their role was terminated immediately, with a severance offer arriving a few days later. However, Oracle’s terms quickly became a point of contention, and some laid-off employees pushed back. The company offered fairly standard Corporate America terms: in exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay for the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. Oracle also paid for one month of COBRA insurance. The catch was that, although stock compensation often makes up a significant portion of a tech worker’s pay—especially at Oracle—the company did not accelerate soon-to-vest restricted stock units (RSUs). Any shares that hadn’t vested by the termination date were forfeited, even those granted as retention incentives or in place of salary increases tied to promotions. According to Time, one long-tenured employee lost $1 million in stock that was just four months from vesting, as RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation.

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Some employees also discovered that, if they were classified as remote workers by the company and didn’t work in a state with stronger worker protections like California or New York, Oracle claimed they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protections. The WARN Act is a law requiring companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months’ notice before letting them go, triggered when 50 or more people are impacted at one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be sidestepped. Some people were unaware they were classified as remote, because they were near an office and worked on a hybrid schedule. Even if covered by the WARN Act, this didn’t necessarily extend severance, the former Oracle employee said, because Oracle included the two months’ WARN notice pay in its existing calculation of four weeks plus one week per year.

At least 90 people signed a public petition urging the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other big tech companies conducting mass layoffs in the name of AI. For instance, Meta’s severance package, according to an email published by Business Insider, started at 16 weeks of base pay, plus two weeks for every year of employment, and covered COBRA for 18 months. Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to long-serving employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks’ pay, and an additional one to two weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank, the Seattle Times reported. Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its employees, offered lump sum severance equivalent to base pay through the end of 2026, plus healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and accelerated vesting of stock through August 15. So if an employee was close to obtaining another tranche, they will get it.

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It was a take-it-or-leave scenario, the employee said. When asked about its severance terms, classifying employees as remote, and the failed attempt by employees to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment. Such a reaction from the company isn’t a surprise, not even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it does underscore that, for all the theoretical high pay (often via stocks) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employee’s market, they have very few protections in place when it isn’t.