When you're talking about thousands of people getting hired a year, and a sudden event having to be done that affects 11,000 employees, you're bound to get a couple of very unusual and unfortunate cases.
If we looked at different windows of time, we would get even more people who fall into sympathetic categories. How many people were just laid off after just 2 weeks of being on the job / moving countries? How about a month ago? 2 months?
I wonder why the news story didn't look at an even larger window? But I guess they just are interested in (or heard about) the sensational case that draws your attention, huh? Or isn't the real story, "where's the person who got off his flight that morning and received an email that he was laid off?"
When you deal with human processes, and have to draw a line somewhere, certain cases will pop up as falling into very odd or unfortunate cracks. Hopefully the compensation and severance is designed to make up for these cases.