IT and networking multinational company Cisco has fired close to 700 employees in the Bay Area, which also includes 80 people in its San Francisco offices, SFGATE reported. This comes after the company laid off 4,000 employees in December.
Layoffs affected many departments, including software and hardware engineering, programme management, product design, marketing, and others. A total of 371 employees are impacted at the company's San Jose, California, headquarters, 222 employees (mostly engineers and technical employees) are laid off in the nearby city of Milpitas, and 80 employees are being let go from the company's San Francisco office.
"At its headquarters, 371 workers were affected, including two Cisco vice presidents," the report said.
Cisco is just one of many tech behemoths laying off employees as the industry experiences a downturn after the coronavirus pandemic and rising inflation. Companies including Meta, Amazon, and Twitter have laid off hundreds and thousands of employees in the last couple of months.
Earlier Cisco had laid off around 5 per cent of its workforce, which is more than 4,000 employees. The layoffs are reportedly a part of a "rebalancing" act while "rightsizing certain businesses.”
Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, did not reveal anything about layoffs, saying 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."
"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," he had told the analysts.
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