Cisco Systems began notifying roughly 4,000 employees on May 14, 2026, that their jobs were eliminated — the same day the San Jose networking giant posted record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion, a 12 percent year-on-year gain — because the company is reallocating investment to AI infrastructure at a pace it says cannot wait. For the approximately 4,000 workers losing their livelihoods, and the hundreds of thousands of enterprise IT professionals who may follow, the announcement crystallises the central labour question of 2026: can a company this profitable justify eliminating this many jobs?
