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Cisco layoffs 2026
There is a sentence that appears in almost every major tech layoff in 2026. It goes something like this: we are investing heavily in AI, and to do that, we need to restructure. Cisco’s version of that sentence came from CEO Chuck Robbins in May, when he told employees the company needed to make “hard decisions, about where we invest, how we’re organised, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us.”
The opportunity, in Cisco’s case, is AI networking infrastructure. The hard decision, in California’s case, is 471 jobs.
According to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification letters filed with the California Employment Development Department, public regulatory documents that California law requires employers to file at least 60 days before large layoffs, Cisco’s California layoffs will eliminate 236 positions in San José, 154 in Milpitas, and 81 in San Francisco. Employees received notices on 14th May, 2026. Terminations are scheduled to begin on 13 July, with some affected workers potentially departing within 13 days of that date. The company described the reductions as permanent in its WARN filings.
According to Cisco’s official May 2026 Cisco restructuring announcement, cited by TechCrunch and The Register, the California cuts are part of a planned global reduction of fewer than 4,000 positions — representing less than 5 percent of Cisco’s workforce of approximately 86,200 employees as of July 2025.
The California WARN filings show that Cisco software engineer layoffs form the largest single group affected, with 56 positions scheduled for elimination, 34 in Milpitas, 19 in San José, and 3 in San Francisco. An additional 39 software engineering technical leader roles are also being cut, with Milpitas accounting for 27 of those positions.
Other affected roles include 17 engineering product managers, 15 software engineering leaders, 12 directors of software engineering, 12 engineering program managers, 9 directors of product management, 8 business operations managers, 7 site reliability engineers, 7 program managers, and 7 software quality assurance engineers. This Cisco cybersecurity and networking workforce reduction is not a cuts-at-the-edges restructuring. It reaches deep into technical teams and management simultaneously across all three Bay Area offices.
Here is what makes the Cisco fiscal 2026 story genuinely difficult to explain with a straight face. In the same quarter that Cisco filed these WARN notices, the company reported its highest revenue ever for a fiscal third quarter. According to Cisco’s Q3 FY2026 earnings release, confirmed by Reuters and CNBC, Cisco Q3 2026 revenue reached USD 15.8 billion, the highest in the company’s history for that quarter. Net income rose 35 percent year-over-year to USD 3.4 billion.
A company cutting jobs is supposed to be a struggling company. Cisco is not struggling. It is, by its own financial reporting, thriving. The cuts exist not because the business is failing, but because the business is being rebuilt around AI, specifically Cisco networking AI infrastructure and cybersecurity products that serve data centres and AI computing systems and the humans who built the previous version of Cisco are not all needed for the next one.
According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, cited by TechCrunch, US technology companies announced 123,653 tech layoffs in 2026 between January and May, a 66 percent increase from the same period in 2025. The firm noted that companies cited AI more often than any other reason for workforce reductions, while also cautioning that AI alone does not fully explain the scale of the trend.
Meta, Snap, Block, Oracle, and Amazon have all announced significant AI job cuts in the tech industry this year. What Cisco adds to that list is the clearest articulation yet of the underlying logic: record revenue, record profit, and a Cisco restructuring 2026 anyway, because the future the company is building requires a different workforce than the one it currently has.
The Chuck Robbins restructuring announcement in May promised that Cisco would lower costs in some business areas while directing more resources toward selected AI investments. The 471 people in California who received notices on 14 May represent the human cost of that calculation, announced during a quarter when Cisco earned more money than it ever has at that point in its fiscal year.
Editor’s Note: This report is based on California WARN Act filings, Cisco’s official disclosures and credible media reports on the company’s 2026 restructuring.
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