During the call on Friday, Ryan claimed to Insider that he attempted to access a workplace network but was unsuccessful. He added that his management attributed the troubles to technical difficulties after other team members complained of similar difficulties. Later, according to Lanigan-Ryan, his email was banned, and the call with his candidate was terminated. Then, he added, “that was it.” “I was blocked out of everything. And then I saw on the news about 15, 20 minutes later that Google was announcing 12,000 layoffs.” Lanigan- Since November 2021, Ryan has been performing contract work at Google’s Dublin, Ireland, office for headhunter Morgan McKinley. Even though Morgan McKinley paid him, he claimed that “for all intents and purposes, I was a Google team member.”
On Friday at around 2:30 a.m. PST, or 10:30 a.m. local time in Dublin, Google publicly announced mass layoffs. This was after employees there had begun the day’s work. Lanigan-Ryan claimed he hadn’t heard anything from Google regarding his dismissal. However, only emails from Morgan McKinley, which Insider could access, informed the impacted employees that their work would end on February 3 and that they needed to return their equipment to Google.
A Google representative pointed Insider to a company blog post from Friday that detailed the layoffs. Moreover, it stated that while US employees had received emails informing them of the changes, “in other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practises,” according to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Other laid-off employees have voiced amazement at Google’s silence regarding the layoffs. Employees in the US were notified by email that they were being let go.
Fired employees from Google receives a warning saying, “access denied”
Seven-year Google employee Anna Ratner, who most recently served on the company’s trust and safety team, told Insider that she received an “access denied” warning when she attempted to enter her work computers on Friday morning. The employee claimed that she “instantly lost access to everything” after seeing a pop-up window on her laptop with information on severance.
“It was just that email, ‘we don’t have a job for you,’ and that’s it,” according to Ratner. Although it was “extremely impersonal,” she said that she wasn’t sure how else Google could have simultaneously informed thousands of employees that they were being laid off.
Although Lanigan-Ryan had noted significant budget reductions, notably in social events, he had yet to anticipate layoffs. He claimed that although Google temporarily halted hiring over the summer, it only did so for a few months.
Ryan claimed that although Google has extended his contract by one year, it was initially scheduled to expire in September 2022. So, in reality, I thought I was safe, he added.
He claimed that even though the firm might decide not to renew some employees’ contracts. It would never let them expire early. He said that Google shifted him and a few Dublin employees from hiring marketing people to hiring staff for Google Cloud. This industry was experiencing rapid expansion in late 2022.
