- In a viral TikTok, Kimberly Diaz said she learned of her termination from YouTube in the middle of a business trip.
- Diaz said a colleague who wasn't impacted helped her reschedule her flight back home.
Kimberly Diaz, a former YouTube employee, was one of 12,000 staffers who said she was impacted by Google's sweeping layoffs.
In a TikTok video that has accrued 1 million views, Diaz said she learned of her termination in the middle of a business trip.
@__kimberlydiaz Replying to @pinkyalfieandvicky story time of how i got let go while on a client visit… part one #googlelayoffs #layoffs #techlayoffs #bigtech ♬ original sound - Kimberly Díaz
According to her LinkedIn profile, Diaz joined Google in 2018 as an intern, and in 2021 was promoted to her current position of global partner lead at YouTube for retail, fashion, and branded apparel. Her profile currently denotes that she's "ex-YouTube" and "ex-Google."
Diaz, who served as a liaison between brands and influencers for sponsored content on YouTube, she explained on TikTok, was in Florida for a meeting with an undisclosed retailer last Thursday. After having dinner with the company's chief marketing officer, she said she woke up at 6 a.m. the next morning to prep for a meeting but found she couldn't log into her account.
Ten minutes later, Diaz said she received word from Google that her position had been eliminated, effective immediately. Diaz was set to fly home to New York that evening, and even though Google didn't cancel her return flight, she wanted to get home as soon as possible
"The last thing I wanted to do was sit in the Fort Myers, Florida airport until my flight at 6 p.m," she said.
Diaz said a coworker who wasn't impacted by the layoffs shared her credit card information so that she could book an earlier flight home. Diaz was locked out of all company systems, she said, and wasn't sure whether she'd be able to get reimbursed.
"I was locked out of everything, I wasn't able to change my flight using the company system," she said. "Getting laid off is an isolating experience, so the fact that she thought about me and was willing to do that for me — it meant so much."
In a subsequent video, Diaz said she'd been caught off-guard by the layoffs, after a team meeting the week prior in which a director had praised her team for hitting its revenue goals.
@__kimberlydiaz Replying to @christiangiadolor07 no sign and my team was exceeding all our OKRs and KPIs #layoff #googlelayoffs #bigtech #layoffseason ♬ original sound - Kimberly Díaz
Google became the latest tech giant to undergo layoffs on Friday when CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a staff memo that the company was laying off 6% of its global workforce. Diaz is far from the only ex-Googler to bemoan the abrupt and impersonal way that the layoffs were conducted, with some company veterans of more than a decade expressing their grievances.
Justin Moore, a Google engineer for 16 years, criticized the "faceless" tech giants who see staff as "100% disposable" in a LinkedIn post after he said he was laid off via an automated account deactivation. Another software engineer of two decades, Jeremy Joslin, wrote on LinkedIn that his termination was a "slap in the face."
Unfortunately, Diaz is also not the only recent layoff who received their news during a work trip. On Friday, Leanne Butkovic, an entertainment editor for Thrillist tweeted that she learned of her termination on her flight back from covering the Sundance Film Festival. Butkovic said she had been with the company for seven years.
In addition to working at YouTube, Diaz is active on TikTok, where she counts roughly 19,000 followers and frequently posts content about curly hair.
Neither Diaz nor YouTube immediately responded to Insider's request for comment.