Laid off from Okta.

What Okta layoffs have meant for employees

Okta's fiscal year ends on January 31, and each of its announced rounds landed within days of a close, the pattern SFGATE described in 2025 as layoffs at the start of February three years in a row. The stated reasons shifted from year to year. Todd McKinnon's 2023 email said a growth plan built on the prior year's demand had left Okta overhired, and he wrote that he wished he had responded sooner. In 2024, after Okta had reported a loss for January through October 2023, as SFGATE's 2024 report noted, his message to staff, which CNBC printed, came out of planning for the next fiscal year and said costs were still too high. By 2025, Okta's 8-K spoke of reallocating resources toward growth. If you work at Okta, that round is the telling one, because it followed the company's first quarterly profits.

The packages changed from round to round as well. The 2023 email set its minimum "through a combination of notice and severance," so time on notice was part of that minimum, not an addition to it, and it kept laid-off US staff eligible, as applicable, for the bonus or sales incentive of the fiscal year that had closed days earlier. The 2024 message listed more time on payroll and cash severance as two separate items, and both years named help for employees on visas. A spokesperson's 2025 statement to SFGATE spoke of support and resources for those leaving. In 2023 and 2024, US staff were told an email would arrive within 15 minutes with word on their own role, and those affected would meet with their leadership that day. Outside the US the process was to follow local law, and in 2024 it could include consultations with potentially affected employees, where appropriate, before any decision was confirmed. If an Okta package states its pay in weeks, the split between notice and severance is one point of comparison with that 2023 minimum, though healthcare, bonus eligibility and vesting were part of the 2023 package too.

Okta's filings also describe how quickly each plan wrapped up on its books. Its October 2023 quarterly report says the 2023 plan was substantially complete by the first quarter of fiscal 2024, and Okta's fiscal 2026 annual report describes the costs of the 2024 and 2025 rounds the same way, each substantially complete by the first quarter of the next fiscal year, the quarter that runs February through April. Those dates describe each plan on Okta's books. California's notices kept a separate timeline, with April effective dates in both 2024 and 2025, as our WARN tracker shows. Okta's 2023 8-K and 2024 8-K, like the 2025 one, expected most of each round's severance and benefits cash to be paid in that first quarter as well.

SFGATE found remote workers on both California notices alongside staff from the San Francisco headquarters, so those filings covered more than the people at one address. By our arithmetic, the notices' counts come to about one in five of the 2024 cut and about three in ten of 2025's, so most people in each round weren't on a California notice. Anyone whose Okta work was based in California can find the state's claim process under California unemployment benefits.

For anyone cut in one of these rounds, the reason Okta gave for that round is a ready answer, in the company's own words, when a new employer asks why you left, and explaining a layoff to an interviewer goes through how to frame it.