By Clare Duffy and Catherine Thorbecke | CNN
On the morning of January 20, one Google employee had to call tech support after getting hit with an unusual error message when they tried to log in to their work system.
Another employee’s manager was on vacation, so they had no one to reach out to when rumors of layoffs started to swirl.
A third was waking up to demands from their toddler when their phone started to buzz with text messages asking, “Are you safe?”
The three employees, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, were all among the 12,000 workers laid off by Google that day. While the