She went viral running a Burger King solo. Then she got fired.

Nykia Hamilton went viral last month after a customer posted a TikTok showing the 25-year-old running a short-staffed Burger King in South Carolina by herself.

Now she’s out of a job - fired for being late amid her frequent struggles to line up child care, she said in a TikTok.

“Bruh (Burger King) fired me because I’ve been late because of my kids,” she said in her own TikTok post. “My kids come first. Y’all don’t pay for no babysitter, or nothing.”

Hamilton went viral in July after the posting about her solo shift at a restaurant in Columbia. A customer narrated the video that showed Hamilton behind the counter, bagging orders alone during the dinner rush.

“She’s doing the fries, she’s doing the burgers, she’s doing the chicken sandwiches. She’s doing everything by herself,” the customer who posted the TikTok said in the video. “Y’all need to get her some help up in here.”

Both chapters of Hamilton’s story sparked a blend of online outrage and support, especially from parents who empathized with the difficulties of juggling child care and work. GoFundMe donations are pouring in for the 25-year-old single mother of three, who has raised more than $125,000. She’s using the money to take care of her children, help her mother pay rent and start a cleaning business so she can be her own boss, she said in another TikTok.

In an emailed statement, Burger King confirmed Hamilton’s termination by the franchise owner “due to repeated attendance issues.” However, the company said it was disappointed that its policy requiring multiple employees per shift “wasn’t followed.”

“No Team Member should ever be left to run a restaurant alone, even for a short period of time,” Burger King said in the statement. “While we can’t share more on individual personnel matters, we’re focused on making sure every restaurant, whether company or franchise-run, has the staffing and support needed to take care of our Team Members and deliver the kind of experience our Guests expect.”

Hamilton did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post.

The footage of Hamilton holding down the fast food restaurant alone stunned many viewers, but Hamilton told WACH FOX in July that it was far from the first time she’d done the work of several people by herself, sometimes during shifts stretching more than 12 hours.

“One of my employees just quit on me, and they didn’t have anyone else to come in, so I had to work by myself, and close by myself,” Hamilton told Fox. “Had to do the dishes, do prep, do the floor, do the front counter, drive-through.”

Often, Hamilton said, she has to choose between working and taking care her children.

“I be missing out on my kids’ lives when I work so much,” Hamilton told Fox. “I have to provide for them, but I really don’t have time to spend with them and it hurts me a lot.”

The incident underscores the challenge of balancing caregiving duties and work, a burden that statistically falls more heavily on women – a large number of whom have left the labor force this year. The share of working mothers ages 25 to 44 with young children has fallen nearly every month this year, the Washington Post has reported, enough to wipe out many of the gains made by working mothers after the pandemic, when remote work arrangements and flexible schedules lured many back to the labor force.

Some 212,000 women older than 20 have stopped working or applying for jobs since January, and there are particularly pronounced drops for Black women and those ages 25 to 34, Labor Department data shows. And while the unemployment rate, at 4.2%, remains low, the share of women in the workforce has fallen since January.