This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
Tesla told staff it would lay off more than 10% of its workforce Sunday evening, but some workers didn’t realize they were being fired until they showed up at company facilities, five employees told Business Insider current or former.
The cuts have impacted both engineers and production workers. At the Tesla factory in Sparks, Nevada, workers faced a line lasting about two hours Monday morning to enter the facility following badge checks, a worker said.
At the factory, the security team was scanning the badges of workers exiting shuttles that shuttle people between the factory and nearby parking lots, said two current Tesla employees who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the matter. Typically, security guards check workers’ badges on site, but usually don’t scan them directly, the two workers said. On Monday morning, officials located the workers who had been fired and sent them back in separate vans, the two workers said.
Three other former Tesla employees said workers at the Fremont factory were told by security that if their badges didn’t work, they would no longer be employed.
Tesla employees who were fired were notified via personal emails Sunday evening and had their access to Tesla systems revoked, four workers said. The company email sent by Elon Musk to announce the cuts was delivered just before midnight PT on Sunday, according to a timestamp on the memo viewed by BI.
“We have conducted a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount globally. Unfortunately, as a result, your position has been eliminated in this restructuring,” Light a separate email informing affected employees that they had been laid off, according to a copy seen by BI.
The email sent directly to staff on redundancy pay said the cuts would be effective immediately and that workers would receive information regarding their layoffs within 48 hours.
The same day Tesla announced the layoffs, at least two executives resigned from the company. Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Electrical Engineering Drew Baglino and Vice President of Public Policy and Business Development Rohan Patel said on X that they left Tesla on Sunday.
A Tesla spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Before the layoffs, Tesla employed more than 140,000 workers worldwide, including more than 3,000 at its factory in Nevada.
Tesla workers aren’t the first to unceremoniously discover they’ve been fired while trying to return to their previous jobs. Last year, some former Google employees told BI they learned they were fired because they couldn’t come into the office with their badges.