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This past week, I’ve been speaking to a lot of those same people. Most of them are now on the outside.
Here’s what we’re hearing.
The scale
On the morning of 10 June 2026, thousands of ServiceNow employees joined what they thought were routine meetings and found HR on the call. Within minutes, roles were eliminated. By the time the call ended, laptops were locked.
Numbers internally range from 300 to 2,500. California WARN notices filed with the California EDD confirm significant cuts at both the Santa Clara HQ and San Diego office. Multiple directors told us that even VPs were given less than 24 hours’ notice and a script. Nobody below SVP level knew who was on the list or why.
Who got cut, and there’s no clean pattern
This is the part that keeps coming up in every conversation we’re having. Normally in a restructuring, you can find the logic: a product being wound down, a layer of management being removed. Here, nobody can.
The cuts hit sales, solution consulting, marketing, engineering, training, product, CEG, and ServiceNow University. In India, 70% of the DemoHub organisation went in a single Zoom call. In ANZ, entire SSE teams were eliminated. In LATAM, top-performing SC managers got the call.
People with 10 years at the company were let go alongside people who started 90 days ago. Directors were cut on the same calls as junior ICs. One person we spoke to was mid-treatment for a serious illness with strong performance reviews. Another was on maternity leave.
The consistent message from management: “This is not performance related.”
The consistent reality: managers couldn’t explain who was chosen or why. One director summed it up well: “There is no logic, and there is no communication coming from the top.”
The acquisitions
This is almost certainly part of it. ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for around $3 billion (600-plus employees), Armis for a reported figure that brought in over 1,300 people, and Veza on top of that. One well-placed partner contact put it plainly: “They’re offsetting the headcount from the acquisitions. The 2,500 number makes sense when you add it up.”
The Moveworks deal has taken a lot of the heat internally. ServiceNow paid an enormous amount for an AI service management tool that many people we speak to think overlaps heavily with existing platform capability, and that some argue Microsoft will simply replicate through Teams within a couple of years. The view we keep hearing: it was a bad call made at scale.
What people are most frustrated about is that the people paying the price for that decision are not the people who made it.
And for those wondering whether staff who came across from the acquired companies were affected: some appear to have survived, while long-serving ServiceNow employees did not.
What this does to ServiceNow as a place to work
This is the question that matters most to us, because it affects everyone in the ecosystem.
For a long time, working at ServiceNow carried real weight. The culture under founder Fred Luddy was well regarded. People stayed. Loyalty felt like it went both ways. That reputation was a big part of why the company could attract strong talent away from bigger names.
What we’re hearing now is that the culture has been shifting for a while, and this is the moment people are naming as confirmation of something they’d already sensed. There’s frustration about spending on celebrity endorsements and sports hospitality while the people doing the actual work get cut. There’s frustration about an influx of leadership from Salesforce, a company with a notoriously volatile culture, and the sense that some of that has been imported.
One person who ran a team at ServiceNow for nearly a decade said it simply: “I recognised this wasn’t the company I joined eight years ago.”
The employer brand has taken a hit. Whether that’s recoverable depends on what happens next and how quickly.
The general feel
Shocked. Angry at the manner of it, more than the fact of it. But not beaten.
What stings most in the conversations we’re having isn’t the job loss. It’s being locked out of a laptop before the call finished. It’s a manager who had no idea it was coming and had nothing to offer. It’s 14-hour days and years of work, then a Tuesday morning Zoom with HR on the invite.
One person, nearly ten years in and a consistent top performer, said: “People got rich off my dedication. Shame on me for letting them use me like that.”
That’s the tone of a lot of conversations right now.
For what it’s worth: ServiceNow experience carries genuine weight in the market. The calls we’re already having from partners and customers looking to bring people in confirm that. If you’ve been affected, you’re not starting from scratch.
If you’ve been impacted
Get in touch. We know who’s hiring in the ServiceNow space, we’ll give you a straight conversation, and we won’t waste your time.
And if your organisation is looking at a market with a lot of exceptional ServiceNow talent suddenly available, we can help you move quickly on the right people.
