Perhaps I phrased that wrong.

When we woke up at (roughly at 6:30), she saw a work email on her phone announcing the layoffs.

No, it was me, didn’t read carefully enough. Thank you and hope your wife finds a balanced job soon!

It sounds like their job was pretty toxic and pushing through their work-life boundary. (This has happened to me before).

When that happens regularly, and you get used to being woken up in the middle of the night to respond to a technical outage or needy management, the lightest phone buzz can shock you awake.

Given the described situation, I'm not surprised they woke up to an unexpected phone notification :(

Yeah -- definitely toxic! There were really no boundaries. We have two kiddos as well. So it ended up conflicting with bedtime at night or getting ready for school in the morning. Managers were just not sympathetic at all.

To clarify, we woke up at our normal time and saw the email.

She woke up at a normal hour and saw an email from 3 AM. "Woke up to find a notification on her phone", not "woken up by a notification on her phone".

I read it as “woke up at <some arbitrary, unspecified time> to an email which was sent at 3:16AM.”

I sometimes just wake up randomly in the middle of the night and use the restroom and check my email in the process. I know it’s dumb but I feel like punishing myself.