How do they not have contact phone numbers for their employees?
Because they fired the people who had access to them of course.
“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked”
Simple, the contact information they had was out of date. Not exactly unexpected, especially if these are employees that have been around a while. Employees would have moved, changed phone numbers, etc. and not all of their info was updated in the people management system they use. Address would be updated for payroll, but an accurate phone number isn’t necessary for that, and HR wouldn’t know they changed their personal phone number.
Not an issue for daily operations, especially if they’re assigned a work device. But that would have been left when they were fired.
For that many people, doing that kind of work?
I doubt it unless they all were issued work phones that had to be returned, and even then these are the kinds of employees where they would want alternate methods of contacts in case of an emergency.
You are grossly overestimating much of this capability I assure you. As a contractor under NNSA (though not working directly with the offices these folks would have worked in) a few things I am very confident in: they all had work issued cell phones, the majority did not have a personal cell phone, and the emergency contact info was likely out of date since it would be on the employee usually to update it, and who actively goes into the HR system to update info like that when you’ve worked somewhere for 15 years?
I’m sure some are also just actively ignoring attempts to contact them, I know I would in this situation.
Any other industry, I’d agree with you. Nuke workers are subjected to periodic reinvestigations during which you verify or update your vital information, on top of being required to report any significant life changes within thirty days. In my case, this was done every four years at both locations I’ve worked, so I have reason to believe it would be some similar periodicity for these positions.
I remember something similar happened to Twitter shortly after Elon got his hands on it.
