Almost everyone has been in the position at one time where they’d like to stick it to a company that just fired them. But few ever get the chance to depart in the extremely public fashion that a group of HMV employees did.

The UK branch of the struggling HMV let go 190 of its employees in England on Thursday, and one who still had access to the @hmvtweets official company Twitter account didn’t go quietly. The Tweets have since been deleted, but not before some speedy Twitter followers snapped screengrabs of what the disgruntled ex-employee had to say:

“We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!!” began the Twitter-spree, The Independent reports. What followed was a flurry of tweets, including “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?”

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While the Marketing Director didn’t succeed in shutting down the entire service (although the Fail Whale did make a brief appearance mid-morning), the company managed to gain back control of the account after about 20 minutes, and issued an apology over a series of tweets:

Our @hmvtweets picked up a lot of attention today, it’s clearly been a tough day for us all at hmv, please stick with us#hmvxfactorfiring — hmv (@hmvtweets) January 31, 2013

There have been job losses today, but not in our stores. We are still open for business, thx for your continued support #savehmv — hmv (@hmvtweets) January 31, 2013

One of our departing colleagues was understandably upset. We’re still here thou, thx for supporting hmv thro these challenging times — hmv (@hmvtweets) January 31, 2013

HMV sold off its Canadian stores in June 2011 to Hilco UK. HMV Group in the UK entered bankruptcy administration on January 15, 2013.

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