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Wishing the coworker good luck, the employee went to open Slack, where his access was removed.
The co-worker approached the employee and asked her if he had heard anything and that she had just left.
Layoffs have dominated headlines and online conversations in recent months, with tech giants like Meta and Amazon leading the wave of job cuts. Oracle’s latest round has once again sent shockwaves through the salaried workforce – not just in terms of size, but also in terms of the method of execution.
Imagine starting your day, ready to get to work, only to receive an email that says: “Today is your last day of work.” This has been the sudden, impersonal and surprising reality for thousands of employees in recent months. A Reddit post, which has been circulating on social media, has gone viral online, with one employee sharing how news of his layoff caught him by surprise — not through emails, but through a direct message to a co-worker. He wrote: “I knew I was finished. I couldn’t prove it.”
The co-worker approached the employee and asked her if he had heard anything and that she had just left. Wishing her good luck, the employee went to open Slack, where her access had been removed. “I sat there for a second without really processing it. Then I messaged one of my coworkers on LinkedIn to see what was going on. He had no idea. I messaged my former boss and he confirmed that HR had sent me an email. Email. That’s how I found out.”
The employee then revealed that he never received any official email – unsure if it had arrived in spam or just hadn’t arrived yet. However, he was reading the news of his termination from a former manager who was sitting at his house at nine in the morning. Seeking clarification, he messaged his direct manager on LinkedIn. When the manager responded by saying, “Sorry to hear that,” it made him even more frustrated, and it felt like a cold formality at the company. The story took an unexpected turn when the manager texted back – he too had been laid off.
“The part that shocked me the most wasn’t the work. It was the realization that I couldn’t even count what I had accomplished. I knew I did a good job. I couldn’t prove it. Everything was in systems I could no longer access. My mind had a vague copy. The receipts were behind a login screen that I never saw again. I ended up spending the first two days just trying to rebuild my own history before I could even start applying. I had taken a screenshot of the slow messages at some point. I had saved old performance reviews in Google Drive “Out of habit, it was a humbling thing.”
Many people have resonated with his experience. One user commented, “A familiar thing happened to me. Usually at certain times of the year, I email summaries of what I did to my personal email so I can have it in case something like this happens. However, the last company had a hard and fast rule that you’re not allowed to send anything to a personal email address. Naturally, they suddenly cut off all access and later sent a note to our personal email.”
Another user commented, “I got a phone call from my boss’s boss. Merger. Best thing that ever happened to me. Forced out of a dying industry. Set me up for 21 years with a growing company. Good luck moving forward.”
Another user suggested naming the company or sharing the experience on Glassdoor, to warn others so they don’t face the same situation.
03 Apr 2026 at 6:32 PM IST
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