The pink slips haven't arrived yet, but the uncertainty is killingly painful for the 53,000 employees of Satyam, particularly at a time when IT industry is going slow on recruitment.

Ranked among the top three employers in India in 2008, Satyam's placement test papers were a rage among techies, who compared notes through the internet to make it to the company.

Satyam was ranked the second best employer in 2007 by Hewitt Associates in a study partnered by ‘Wall Street Journal Asia’.

"By God's grace I'm a Satyamite" read a message posted by a Jaipur tech student who got through Satyam in February 2008 - by when the company was already fudging accounts.

"We are now worried about the jobs," said Raghu K, another Satyamite, dismayed by today's revelations of accounts fraud by the company's iconic founder Ramalinga Raju.

Possibility of a takeover too looks distant, further compounding the worries of the employees.

"Initially, our reports suggests that the employees of the IT firm were quite scared about their fate. We were trying to reach the employees but could not get through their board number," Karthik Shekhar, General Secretary of BPO-IT Union UNITES Professionals India, said.

UNITES Professional India, which has 1800 members, said that its website has got 7,000 hits from Hyderabad from Tuesday night.

"It’s not only the employees, their peers and relatives are also coming to our Hyderabad office after the announcement to make out what we can do for them," he added.