Alexa team. HR was available by appointment. Four days out.

A mass email on a Monday morning. System access cut that afternoon. A link at the bottom of the email: "To speak with an HR representative, please use the scheduling link." The earliest available slot was four days later. By then I'd already been asked to return my equipment and had no way to access the documents I needed to understand my severance. The "Alexa is failing" framing that Amazon put out publicly made it worse. We weren't failing. The business case changed — AI changed the landscape. That's different from failure. But calling it failure meant they could frame our layoffs as a consequence of our performance rather than a strategic pivot that had nothing to do with us.