PayPal cuts 600 India jobs in global restructuring push

PayPal cut loose 600 employees across India on Monday morning, August 31st, with no warning and immediate consequences. The workers—spread across technology, engineering, operations, payments, and finance teams in Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad—received calendar invites to join calls, were told they were being terminated, and found their system access revoked within hours. One affected employee described the sequence plainly: an invite arrived Monday morning, the call delivered the news, and then came an off-boarding email. The company promised one month's severance and job assistance, though workers said they were still waiting to hear back on the full settlement.

The cuts represent roughly 10 percent of PayPal's India workforce, which numbers just over 6,000 people. This makes India one of the company's largest employment centers outside the United States—a position it has held since opening its first development center in Chennai in 2008. That facility became PayPal's primary technology hub globally, handling core payment platforms, cloud infrastructure, and distributed computing. A second center in Bengaluru, opened later, focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. The third, in Hyderabad since 2019, specialized in fraud prevention and risk management for small and medium-sized businesses. All three cities felt the impact of this week's cuts.

The layoffs are part of a restructuring PayPal announced in May, when leadership committed to cutting 20 percent of its global workforce over two to three years. At that time, the company employed roughly 23,800 people worldwide, meaning the plan would eliminate around 4,760 roles. The goal is to generate at least $1.5 billion in gross run-rate savings. The India cuts came first, in the Asia-Pacific phase, followed by meetings with affected employees across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa on the same day. In Ireland alone, 164 employees were laid off—about 12 percent of that country's PayPal headcount.

PayPal's move is not isolated. Oracle began another round of job cuts this same week, affecting an estimated 3,000 employees in India. Uber has also started trimming its global and Indian workforce. The pattern reflects a broader reckoning in India's Global Capability Centers—the offshore technology and operations hubs that multinational companies have built over the past two decades. In 2025 alone, more than 6,000 jobs were cut across India's GCC sector as parent companies faced macroeconomic pressure and made aggressive bets on artificial intelligence and automation over traditional headcount growth. Technicolor, the visual effects and animation company, accounted for the largest single blow, shutting down operations and eliminating around 3,000 positions.

For the PayPal workers who received calls Monday morning, the immediate reality was disorientation and uncertainty. One employee noted the lack of prior notice and the gap between promised severance and actual payment. Another simply received a direct email stating they were fired. PayPal did not respond to detailed questions from Moneycontrol about the layoffs, the severance timeline, or the reasoning behind the specific teams affected. What remains clear is that 600 people in three Indian cities lost their jobs in a single morning, and the broader sector they work in continues to contract as global technology companies recalibrate their workforce strategies around new priorities.