Cisco begins layoffs by 5% of its workforce

Last updated on January 13th, 2023 at 04:44 am

As part of the mass layoffs announced last month, Cisco Systems Inc has joined the bandwagon of big tech companies laying off their employees. The company has reportedly begun layoffs by cutting loose about 5 per cent of its workforce, which is about 4000 employees, in a “rebalancing” attempt while “rightsizing certain businesses”.

According to a report in the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the move by company announced last month will result in approximately cutting off of 4,100 jobs at Cisco which has a strong global workforce of 83,000 employees. Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, had said he would “be reluctant to go into a lot of detail here until we’re able to talk to them. I would say that what we’re doing is rightsizing certain businesses”. He had added, “You can just assume that we’re going to — we’re not actually — there’s nothing that’s a lower priority, but we are rightsizing certain businesses.”

On Monday, Cisco employees reportedly had received a notification from the company telling them that they are being cut off. Cisco spokeswoman Robyn Blum declined to directly extend a confirmation about Cisco notifying its workers that they were being laid off. “We didn’t take this decision lightly, and we will offer those impacted extensive support, including generous severance packages,” Blum said in the statement.

“We will do everything we can to help place affected employees in other open roles,” the spokesperson added.  “We’ll have roughly the same number of employees at the end of the fiscal year as we had when we started.” Blum added that despite the job cuts, the company expects to have about the same employee number at the end of its fiscal year as during its starting.

With this, Cisco has joined a growing list of big tech companies including Meta, Twitter, Salesforce among others, which have laid off their thousands of employees to tackle the looming recession, rising interest rates and a slumping stock market.