Google workers found out they were fired when emails came back, employee says

According to a search engine software engineer, some Google employees found out they were out of work when they tried to send emails from their official work accounts only to have those messages bounce back.

Thomas de Rivaz, who still works at the Silicon Valley tech giant’s London office, told Insider that some of his colleagues only learned of their firing “because [their] the email was rejected, and for no other reason.”

The Post requested a comment from Google.

Google employees, who survived the company’s recent purge of about 12,000 of their now-former colleagues, said management has yet to publicize who was fired.

Tim Wilde, a site reliability engineer at Google, told Insider that he learned about the laid-off employees from posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Wilde also said he would send internal messages to colleagues who failed to pass, indicating that the target of his messages had been fired.

Wild, who lives in Boston, said some workers came to the office and tried to log in with their access badge, but were denied. That’s when they realized they were being let go, Wilde told Insider.

De Rivaz told Insider that Google employees are “calculating the number” of laid-off employees on their own.

“Obviously we’re discouraged from sharing them internally – that closes pretty quickly – but the numbers are available for review,” he told Insider.

Ever since Google announced it was laying off on January 20, “we’ve had daily reports of people being laid off from all over the world,” de Rivaz said.

Several former Google employees have described how they learned about the layoffs last month.

A Los Angeles lawyer hired by Google learned he was being fired by the tech giant from an email he received at 2 a.m. while feeding his newborn daughter.

Nicole Tsai, a vlogger from Southern California, posted a viral TikTok video showing the exact moment she found out she was being fired. The video shows Tsai shedding tears when he learns of his dismissal.

Another Los Angeles-based engineer, Ali Neil, 29, said she learned of her dismissal after she received a notice from the company at 2 a.m. local time while she was on mental health leave.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been tightening its belts in recent months due to a drop in revenue reported in its latest earnings report.

The tech giant has turned off costly machines that separated canteen tables from trash and mops, built by robotics subsidiary Everyday Robots as part of company-wide budget cuts.

According to a memo obtained by CNBC, scores of Google employees in the company’s cloud division were told earlier this week that they needed to share desktops and rotate the days they came into the office so they didn’t overlap with their desk colleagues.