It's significant that she did this on her own. You need multiple people for protected concerted activity.

People are acting like higher ups essentially approved this because of a code review process.

The logical leaps people are willing to take because they think the ends justify the means is interesting.

It's a multibillion dollar company. If some of the managers are annoyed/bothered, even greatly, by activities that eventually result in unionization, I'm entirely OK with that. If some of those activities are—oh no!—not nice or Officially Sanctioned, again, don't mind a bit. Given past behavior and the general tendencies of large corporations it'd be pretty surprising if they weren't getting away with breaking some employment laws here and there, so some incredibly mild poking at them is hardly anything to worry about.

It sounds like she went through a code review process for the change, would that count?

While this does not mean higher-ups approved her messages, it does show that she did it by the book.

If the higher ups felt this message was inappropriate and should be removed they could follow the same procedure instead of firing the engineer

Edit: I agree.

I know, I am agreeing with you :)

But alot of people in the comments claim that she more or less hacked the system.

Sorry, my mistake :)

You have to satisfy the criteria of labor law, which is (working from memory here) that two or more employees come together in concert around a workplace issue. At that point they are engaged in protected concerted activity and you can't just fire them.

I don't believe the code review meets this test, but I'd love to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about.

Unfortunately, Purple Communications seems to have just got overturned at Google's urging: https://gizmodo.com/disastrous-nlrb-ruling-adds-another-hurd...