UBS London fixed income employees were told of their firings based on their passes had been deactivated. “Whole desks are gone and there are people stood outside without access to the building,” one tweeter wrote, describing the scene at the bank’s London office.  Another London-based fixed income banker tweeted how she was first alerted to losing her job when her email kept bouncing back on Tuesday morning. “It would be inappropriate to say anything about the rather devastating manner of how this has taken place,” the banker said.

The UBS firings are being played out on Twitter on a daily basis.  UBS was one of the most popular trends on Twitter on Tuesday as the blogosphere flooded with comments in several languages, describing the shock and resentment of staff.  It reached a crescendo as the Swiss bank confirmed plans to cut 10,000 jobs as part of a radical restructuring to slim down its investment banking division.

A banker tweeted: our passes at the London office did not work on arrival: “They are sent into a special room and told they are on special leave.”  UBS has started a consultation process for 100 traders in fixed income, which included one-on-one meetings with a human resources representative. There will be a two-week period during which employees can apply to work in another part of the bank, such as asset management, although it is unlikely many would be redeployed.

In Switzerland, the news reopened a longstanding cultural rift between wealth management and investment banking. Inside Paradeplatz, the most popular news outlet for Zurich-based bankers, had a banner on its homepage stating: “Go to the barricades, Swiss bankers! The losers of the UBS big bang are the Anglo Saxons; they are going on a hunt for the jobs in wealth management.”

But while some of UBS’s London staff were blocked from entering the bank’s offices, its US employees in the New York, Stamford and Weehawken offices were barred from coming to work for entirely other reasons: hurricane Sandy, which swept across the northeast coast. Those UBS offices that were open on Tuesday were operating with critical staff only, and everyone else was encouraged to stay indoors and off the roads, the company said.