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Okta’s 2024 layoffs: 400 jobs cut nearly a year after its last reduction

Okta’s February 1, 2024 restructuring eliminated approximately 400 full-time positions, or 7% of its workforce. The cuts came 364 days after a 300-person reduction and were presented as a move to improve efficiency and support profitable growth.
From TheFinanceBase Team5 min to read
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Okta announced on February 1, 2024, that it would eliminate approximately 400 full-time positions—about 7% of its global workforce. CEO Todd McKinnon said the restructuring was intended to reduce operating costs, improve efficiency and direct spending toward the company’s strongest opportunities for profitable growth. The announcement came 364 days after Okta disclosed a separate reduction of approximately 300 employees.

This was a 2024 event, not a new 2026 layoff announcement. Later reductions mean it is best understood as one stage in a multiyear effort to realign Okta’s workforce and cost structure.

What Okta announced on February 1, 2024

Okta described the action as a companywide restructuring plan and a reduction of approximately 400 full-time employees, equivalent to approximately 7% of its workforce at the time. The formal announcement is in the company’s February 1, 2024 filing.

Okta estimated approximately $24 million in fourth-quarter fiscal 2024 restructuring charges, primarily for severance and employee benefits. Most of the related cash payments were expected during the first quarter of fiscal 2025. The company also expected an insignificant stock-based-compensation adjustment associated with terminated employees.

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The $24 million was an estimated cost of carrying out the restructuring—not a stated measure of annual payroll savings.

Why Okta said it was cutting staff

In a message to employees, McKinnon said Okta’s costs remained too high despite progress and that the company needed to concentrate spending on products, market opportunities and routes to market with the strongest potential. Okta’s stated objectives were operating efficiency and profitable growth.

That explanation is different from saying revenue had collapsed or that a particular security incident caused the cuts. The cited announcement does not attribute the restructuring to a breach, a specific product failure or weak performance by a named department. Broader software-industry pressure to improve margins after pandemic-era hiring helps explain the business setting, but it is external interpretation rather than Okta’s stated cause.

How the 2024 reduction compared with the prior round

Okta announced its previous workforce reduction on February 2, 2023. That plan covered approximately 300 employees, or about 5% of the workforce, and carried an estimated restructuring charge of approximately $15 million, according to the company’s 2023 filing.

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Announcement Approximate positions eliminated Share of workforce Estimated restructuring charge
February 2, 2023 300 5% $15 million
February 1, 2024 400 7% $24 million

On the company’s reported measures, the February 2024 plan was about 100 positions larger and two percentage points greater as a share of staff. The dates were almost exactly a year apart: February 1, 2024 followed February 2, 2023 by 364 days. The percentages refer to Okta’s workforce at each respective date, so they should not be treated as a precise measure of net employment change between the announcements.

Okta’s fiscal 2024 annual report treats the two actions as separate worldwide restructuring plans announced in the first quarters of fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025. It does not establish that the same employees, teams or locations were involved in both plans.

What is known about affected employees

Okta did not publicly provide a breakdown by function, job title, management level, country or office. A company spokesperson declined to identify which roles or geographies were most affected. Claims that the reductions primarily targeted engineering, sales, executives or a particular city are therefore not established by the cited announcement.

Notification and support in the United States

McKinnon’s message said U.S. employees would receive direct notification shortly after the announcement. U.S. workers whose positions were eliminated were told they would receive severance and extended health-care coverage.

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Different rules outside the United States

The process for employees in other countries could differ according to local law and established practice. Severance, notice periods, consultation requirements and benefit continuation were not necessarily uniform worldwide. The announcement date also was not a universal termination date; individual timing could vary by jurisdiction.

How layoffs fit with Okta’s revenue growth

At the time, TechCrunch reported that Okta’s quarterly revenue had risen 21% year over year to $584 million. That result creates an important distinction: a company can grow revenue while reducing headcount if management believes its expense base is too high or that investment should move to different priorities. Revenue growth, operating expenses, free cash flow, GAAP results and non-GAAP results measure different aspects of performance and should not be treated as interchangeable.

The revenue figure was contemporaneous context for the February 2024 announcement, not a current 2026 operating metric. It also does not by itself prove that Okta was financially healthy in every respect or that the restructuring was unnecessary.

Okta’s scale at the time

Okta’s fiscal 2024 Form 10-K reported more than 18,950 customers and more than 7,000 integrations with applications, infrastructure and security vendors as of January 31, 2024. Those figures, reported in the company’s annual filing, show the scale of the identity and security platform during the restructuring period; they do not identify which parts of the organization were reduced.

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What happened after the February 2024 cuts

Later disclosures show that the 400-position plan was not Okta’s final workforce action. The sequence is:

Date Workforce action What the source establishes
February 2, 2023 Approximately 300 employees, about 5% Okta announced a restructuring plan with an estimated $15 million charge.
February 1, 2024 Approximately 400 full-time employees, about 7% Okta announced the restructuring covered in this article, with an estimated $24 million charge.
February 2025 Approximately 180 employees, about 3% TechCrunch later reported another workforce reduction: February 2025 coverage.
Fiscal year ended January 31, 2026 “Insignificant workforce reduction” Okta reported $4 million in restructuring costs in its fiscal 2026 Form 10-K; the filing did not describe another 400-person action.

The later record supports describing the 2023–2026 period as recurring workforce and cost realignment. It does not justify treating every reduction as one continuous plan or assuming that the same functions were affected each time.

What the 2024 announcement does—and does not—show

It does show

  • Okta chose a global restructuring that eliminated approximately 400 full-time positions.
  • The company considered its cost structure too high and linked the action to operating efficiency and profitable growth.
  • Management expected approximately $24 million in restructuring charges, mainly for severance and benefits.
  • The plan was larger than the February 2023 reduction on both the approximate headcount and percentage measures reported by Okta.

It does not show

  • That exactly 400 people were terminated; Okta used an approximate figure.
  • That the cuts were caused by a particular breach, security incident or sales shortfall.
  • That any named department, country or management tier bore most of the reductions.
  • That Okta was insolvent, failing or abandoning its products.
  • That all employees received identical severance or that the $24 million represented recurring savings.

Bottom line

Okta’s February 1, 2024 announcement was a profitability-oriented restructuring at a growing enterprise-software company: approximately 400 full-time roles, or about 7% of its workforce, were eliminated, with roughly $24 million in expected restructuring charges. Coming 364 days after the company’s 300-person reduction, it marked a larger second round rather than a one-off adjustment. The additional reduction reported in February 2025 and the smaller action disclosed for fiscal 2026 show that workforce realignment continued after the 2024 event.

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