At the start of this week, a technical recruiter at Meta (META) thought layoffs wouldn't touch her, she told Yahoo Finance. She performed well at work, always meeting or exceeding expectations at a company that had prioritized attracting engineering talent for years. She was also in her third trimester of pregnancy.

"Until yesterday, I thought I’d be clear in this layoff,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I didn’t think these layoffs would be to the scale that they are, or that I would be affected."

But by 8:45 a.m. ET, she says, she was locked out of her computer, with access only to her work email.

“I tried to go look at benefits," the recruiter said. "I typed it in our search bar, and it wouldn’t let me in, saying I needed internal access.”

Yahoo Finance spoke to three Meta employees who lost their jobs this week, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns that coming forward might affect their future prospects or benefits. They all provided documentation of their employment at the company.

Two common threads emerged from all three of them. First, they all said that management had spent the last few months saying that layoffs weren't on the table. Second, they described a work environment that had shifted radically in recent days, especially after The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that layoffs were imminent.

"Meta was kind of a dream company of mine to work for," the recruiter said. "I really wanted to put my full faith in them, but seeing the scale of these layoffs and how they handled them, I don’t have a lot of faith in this company for the future.”

Meta is not the first tech company to have a mass layoff in recent days. Twitter began layoffs last week that affected 3,700 employees — about 50% of the company that's now owned by billionaire Elon Musk — and those thundered across social media. Still, the Meta layoffs represent something new for the Facebook parent, as it's the company's first-ever major job cut in its nearly 19-year history.Twitter, meanwhile, has done layoffs before, for example in 2015, under then-CEO Jack Dorsey.