Remote Workers Face a Lonely Wave of Layoffs

Angst rippled across laptop screens this month, with dozens of companies announcing layoffs and finding ways to breed extra chaos in the process.

Kerensa Cadenas opened Slack on Friday morning to an expletive-laden message from a colleague that said essentially: I got let go. Ms. Cadenas, steeling herself, checked her email. Then she typed out her own expletive. Shed been laid off, too. Alone in her Brooklyn apartment.

Ms. Cadenas, with more than a hundred of her Vox Media colleagues as well as thousands of other workers this week and last, was submerged in a lonely, surreal wave of remote layoffs. People got the news through emails, Slack messages or video calls, then sent their goodbye notes and powered down their computers, with no teammates around to commiserate over beer.

Normally youre like, OK, I can go get drunk, said Ms. Cadenas, 37, noting that atop the isolation comes frustration with the instability that so many media workers have now come to accept as a fact of their working lives. Its scary because Im like: Will I ever have a savings account? Am I ever going to own something? Probably not.