Oracle cut thousands of jobs. It also filed over 3,100 H-1B visa petitions, including 436 this year alone

When Oracle employees opened their inboxes on the morning of March 31, many found a message that ended their careers at the company. 

"After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organisational change," the email read.  

What those employees likely did not know was that Oracle had, in parallel, been actively petitioning the United States government to hire foreign workers.

According to data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Oracle filed around 3,126 H-1B visa petitions across fiscal years 2025 and 2026, including 436 petitions filed in 2026 alone, the same fiscal in which it is now executing layoffs.

H-1B visas allow US employers to hire foreign nationals, most commonly in technology. Companies must file petitions with USCIS and demonstrate that they cannot find domestic candidates with comparable skills. 

Meanwhile, Amazon filed around 21,696 H-1B petitions across its verticals during the same period, even as it cut roughly 30,000 jobs across two separate rounds of layoffs.

The India impact

Media reports suggest that around 12,000 employees in India could be affected, with a second wave of cuts expected within weeks. 

Oracle had around 162,000 full-time employees globally as of May 2025, according to its latest regulatory filings. The company has not officially disclosed the full scale of the current cuts, but LinkedIn posts from affected workers and reports from Business Insider indicate the restructuring spans multiple departments, including Oracle Health, Sales, Cloud Infrastructure, Customer Success and NetSuite.

The impact is particularly significant given India’s dual role in the global tech labour market, it is both a major source of H-1B talent for the US and a key offshore base for companies like Oracle.

The H-1B visa programme became the subject of a sharp political controversy in the United States last year, after President Donald Trump signed a proclamation imposing a fee of $100,000 per year on certain H-1B visa holders. The move sent Silicon Valley companies that rely heavily on the programme scrambling for alternatives and triggered an industry-wide reassessment of foreign worker pipelines.

Part of a wider reset

Oracle’s layoffs come amid a continuing wave of restructuring across the technology sector, as companies adjust to slower growth, rising costs and shifting investment priorities toward artificial intelligence.

Meta has also cut hundreds of workers in recent weeks. Data from layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi shows that as of early April 2026, more than 41,447 employees across 78 technology companies have lost their jobs this year.