PayPal has laid off around 600 employees across its India offices in Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, according to a report by Moneycontrol. The cut amounts to roughly 10% of the company’s India workforce, which stood at over 6,000 employees, and has touched teams across technology, engineering, operations, payments and finance.
The manner in which employees were informed has drawn some criticism. Affected staff were invited to a call on the morning of August 31, where a large number of employees from across PayPal’s India offices were told, together, that they were being let go. Their system access was reportedly cut immediately once the call ended. Some employees learned of their termination through an email instead. One impacted employee told Moneycontrol that there was no prior warning before the call.
Those let go have been offered a month’s salary as severance, along with job placement assistance, though several employees said they were still waiting on clarity around their final settlement.
Part Of A Much Bigger Global Cut
The India layoffs are not a standalone decision, they’re a slice of a much larger restructuring PayPal announced back in May, when the company said it would cut close to 20% of its global workforce over the next two to three years. That works out to roughly 4,760 roles out of the approximately 23,800 people PayPal employed worldwide at the end of 2025. The company has said the plan is meant to save at least $1.5 billion a year in run-rate costs, as it leans harder into AI-led efficiency across its operations.
The India cuts also follow closely on the heels of PayPal trimming around 160 jobs in Ireland, about 12% of its workforce there, suggesting the company is now moving through its international offices in phases after starting with cuts closer home in the US.
Why India Matters To PayPal
PayPal’s relationship with India goes back to 2008, when it opened its first development centre in Chennai, now its oldest and largest technology hub outside the US. The Chennai centre works on the company’s core payments platform, distributed computing and cloud infrastructure. Bengaluru, PayPal’s other major India hub, focuses on machine learning, artificial intelligence, fraud prevention, risk management and data science, while the newer Hyderabad centre, added in 2019, largely supports fraud prevention and risk work. Together, these centres have made India one of the most important pieces of PayPal’s global technology backbone, which makes the scale of this cut, a tenth of the local workforce, a fairly significant one even within the context of the company’s larger global downsizing.
Part Of A Wider Pattern
PayPal is far from alone in trimming its India headcount this year. Oracle has been reported to be planning cuts of around 3,000 jobs in India as part of a global reduction that could touch 10,000 roles, its second such round in 2026 after cutting tens of thousands of jobs earlier in the year. Uber, Wells Fargo and Walmart have also gone through recent layoffs or restructuring that have touched their India teams. The pattern across these companies looks similar: global technology and financial services firms citing cost discipline and a push toward AI adoption as the reasoning behind reducing headcount, even in a market like India that has historically been seen as a hub for growth rather than cuts.
For PayPal specifically, this is unlikely to be the last round. With the broader global plan targeting cuts stretched over multiple years, and the company having already moved through the US, Ireland and now India, more of its international offices could see similar restructuring as the plan plays out.