Oracle Fired 30,000 People by Email at 6AM. Here's What Else Happened This Month.

The headline: 30,000 people found out by email

On March 31, Oracle sent a mass termination email at 6:00 AM Eastern. No phone call. No meeting with a manager. No warning.

The subject came from "Oracle Leadership." The message: your role has been eliminated as part of a "broader organizational change." Today is your last working day. Sign your severance via DocuSign before your access gets deactivated.

TD Cowen estimates the total cuts at 20,000 to 30,000 employees. Roughly 18% of Oracle's 162,000-person workforce. It hit Cloud, Sales, Oracle Health, Customer Success, and NetSuite across the U.S., India, Canada, and Mexico. Senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers. Not a performance-based trim. A structural gut.

The layoffs are tied to Oracle's AI and cloud push, including a $100 billion deal with OpenAI. They're not cutting because they can't afford the people. They're cutting because they'd rather spend on data centers.

Two months ago, Block cut 4,000. HP announced 6,000. Wise cut 2,000. All citing "AI-driven efficiency." Oracle just did it at 10x the scale and without the pretense of a conversation.

And they weren't alone this month.

Epic Games cut over 1,000 on March 24. Fortnite engagement is declining. CEO Tim Sweeney was direct: they're spending more than they're making. Notable: Sweeney explicitly said the layoffs "aren't related to AI." In a month where nearly every other CEO blamed AI, that candor stands out. Severance is solid (4+ months base, 6 months healthcare, accelerated vesting through January 2027).

Disney began laying off 1,000 on April 8. New CEO Josh D'Amaro is cutting across traditional TV (including ESPN), the movie studio, product and tech, and corporate. Paramount Skydance has shed 2,000 since the Ellison takeover. Sony cut hundreds. Entertainment is in structural contraction.

Snap cut 1,000 on April 15, plus 300 open roles. That's 16% of the full-time workforce. CEO Evan Spiegel cited AI that "enable our teams to reduce repetitive work." Snap's stock jumped 7%.

Qualcomm is cutting 66 across 11 San Diego facilities. Eighty percent in IT, engineering, and cybersecurity. Nearly half were senior roles. Salaries ranged from $95,000 to $300,000. Qualcomm isn't in crisis (revenue grew 5% to $12.25B). Smaller number. But for every person on that list, it's the only number that matters.

The number: 65%

Buried in Snap's announcement is the data point that matters most this month.

Snap says AI now generates more than 65% of its new code. Not "assists with." Generates. Two-thirds of all new code at a public company is written by machines.

A month ago, Vercel replaced 9 of 10 salespeople with an AI agent. When Anthropic's research showed 75% of programming tasks exposed to AI, that was a projection. When Snap publishes 65%, that's a receipt. Companies are no longer experimenting with AI replacement. They're reporting the results.

Where the jobs and money are actually going

Not everything is red. The data shows clear winners, and they're worth knowing if you're deciding where to focus your search.

Banking just posted its best quarter in years. Bank of America beat expectations: $1.11 EPS (vs. $1.01 est.), net income up 17%, equities trading up 30%. Goldman Sachs reported $17.55 EPS. Morgan Stanley topped estimates at $3.43 EPS (vs. $3.00 est.) with record equities trading revenue. Financial services was one of only two sectors that added jobs during the February report. These earnings confirm the sector has budget, momentum, and a reason to hire.

Healthcare is the engine. Of the 369,000 jobs created since January 2026, 348,000 went to women and 21,000 went to men, according to BLS. The reason is structural, not political: healthcare added 390,000 jobs over the past 12 months (more than the economy overall) and women hold roughly 80% of healthcare jobs. When one sector drives all net job growth, the composition of that sector drives the demographics.

Tech is contracting in headcount but paying more for the roles that remain. CompTIA's State of the Tech Workforce 2026 report projects the tech workforce will grow twice as fast as the overall U.S. workforce over the next decade. Median tech salary: $112,805, more than double the national median. But the growth is concentrated in specific specializations.

The capital is flowing in the same direction. AI infrastructure and defense pulled massive rounds this month.

• 💰 Mistral AI: $830M in debt financing to build its first AI data center.
• 💰 Harvey AI: $200M at $11B. Legal AI. Previously flagged in March.
• 💰 Leapsome: $180M. HR technology.
• 💰 Synthesia: valuation nearly doubled to $4B. AI video.
• 💰 Anduril: reportedly raising at $60B. Last month: a $20B Army contract.
• 💰 Roivant/Genevant: $2.25B patent settlement with Moderna.
• 💰 Aquabyte: $25M Series B. SambaNova: $15M additional from Intel.

Billions cut from headcount, billions deployed into AI infrastructure. Harvey, Mistral, Synthesia, Anduril. These companies are hiring for the roles that Oracle, Snap, and Disney are eliminating.

Long-term unemployment: the story behind the 4.3%

The headline unemployment rate is 4.3%. For experienced professionals, that number is meaningless.

The number of Americans unemployed for six months or more has grown by over 300,000 in the past year. These aren't recent graduates. They're HR analysts with master's degrees, marketing directors with decades of experience, tech managers who had recruiters offering signing bonuses two years ago.

Marketplace profiled several. A few details stuck out.

Brett Kling, an HR and technology analyst with a master's in organizational psychology, goes to every open mixer and meetup he can find. "Anytime there's an open event, where you can have some facetime with people, I try to do that." In an age of AI screening, he says human connection feels like his only hope.

Lynise Harris spent months looking for a role that matched her executive HR experience. She eventually pivoted to career coaching at a nonprofit. Different salary. Different title. But working. Her advice: limit active job search to about two hours a day. Spend the rest taking care of yourself. "That shows a potential employer your flexibility, your adaptability, your resilience."

Steve Jones, a marketing director in his mid-50s, was laid off a year ago. He feels his experience level works against him with recruiters, even if he'd accept a pay cut.

The labor market is frozen. People aren't moving. Hiring is at its lowest point in decades outside the 2008 crash and the pandemic. The overall rate looks fine. For experienced professionals in the wrong seat when the music stopped, it hasn't been fine for a long time.

Harris is right: two hours a day of focused searching beats eight hours of spray-and-pray. But those two hours go further when they're spent on roles at companies that are actually hiring, in sectors that are actually growing. That's what the signals and fit scores in your Kinship dashboard are for.

Other signals from this month's scan

The full scan caught 37 signals across 1,568 companies. Here are the rest worth noting.

• 🔴 Block (Square/CashApp): workforce now under 6,000. Down from over 10,000 as an "AI-era reset." First flagged in March. Cuts continued.
• 🔴 Take-Two Interactive: fired its head of AI and entire AI division. Weeks after the CEO publicly said they were "actively embracing AI." When a company eliminates the team it just called strategic, that's a red flag.
• 🔴 Envato: 200 employees (33% of workforce).
• 🔴 Mattel: 65 from El Segundo HQ, plus 89 cut in January.
• 🔴 Spotify: 15 (3% of podcasts division) including Ringer staff.
• 🔴 IKEA (Ingka): 800 office jobs in Sweden and Netherlands.
• 🔴 Celonis: all QA roles globally eliminated.
• 🔴 Goodnotes: workforce reductions in restructuring.
• 🟠 ZoomInfo: 52-week low of $5.55. Analyst targets slashed. Beating earnings but stock in freefall.
• 🟠 ZipRecruiter: stock down 57% to $2.57. Institutional ownership dropping.
• 🟠 Rigetti Computing: Q4 revenue $1.9M, missing $2.33M estimates. Wider losses.
• 🟠 AudioEye: cut full-year guidance, stock dropped 22.4%.

What this means for your search

The 6AM email is the new normal. Oracle fired 30,000 people with a form letter. Snap told people to work from home, then sent the termination email within the hour. If you're relying on "I'll see it coming," you won't. The only defense is knowing which companies are stable before you're inside one that isn't.

Ask about the AI plan in every interview. "How is this team using AI today?" and "Is this role expected to exist in 18 months?" are not aggressive questions. They're due diligence. Epic's Sweeney was honest that AI wasn't the cause. Most companies are either using AI as a layoff justification (Oracle, Snap) or eliminating the AI team they just called strategic (Take-Two). The answer tells you everything about the role's shelf life.

If you've been searching for 6+ months, change something. Long-term unemployment is up 300,000 year-over-year. The people in the Marketplace story are experienced and doing everything right. But "everything" is limited to what you can find on your own. Two hours of targeted searching with data on company health beats eight hours on a job board that tells you nothing about the company behind the listing.

Every week, we scan all active companies in the Kinship network for layoffs, funding rounds, financial trouble, and hiring freezes. This month: 1,568 companies checked. 37 signals found. When a company triggers a signal, it flows directly into your job scores. A strong fit at a company that just cut 18% of its workforce will score lower than the same fit at a company with fresh capital and growing teams.

You shouldn't have to piece together layoff trackers, earnings calls, and LinkedIn rumors to figure out which companies are worth your time. We scan 1,568 companies every week so you don't have to.