Cisco to lay off thousands of employees

Another one bites the dust. Cisco—an American multinational tech company with a market cap of around $198 billion—is preparing to lay off 5% of its employees. On Wednesday, the company announced a new restructuring plan, leaving more than 4,000 employees without work, according to CNBC.

The layoffs come at a time when Cisco is working to “realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas,” according to an SEC filing.

Cutting room. This isn’t the first or even second time the company has broken out the snipping tool. Cisco began laying off employees in late 2022 and in July 2023, as IT Brew previously reported.

At the time, Justin Chinich, a spokesperson for Cisco, played it cool, stating in an email to IT Brew that the July layoffs were “part of the rebalancing effort we began in November 2022, which included a limited restructuring impacting our real estate portfolio and approximately 5% of our workforce.”

The July layoffs came right before Cisco entered a deal in September 2023 to acquire software company Splunk for $28 billion—a company that also, notably, laid off 7% of its workers in November, due to the state of the overall market, which Splunk CEO Gary Steele said had retracted.

Zoom out. Tech employees at Microsoft, PayPal, and SAP have also taken hits, with the entire tech industry seeing 34,500 layoffs this year alone, according to data from Layoffs.fyi, which has tracked tech layoffs since March 2020. Research also shows that women in the tech industry are disproportionately affected by layoffs in the male-dominated industry.

IT Brew has reached out to Cisco for comment.