New Delhi, Jul 19 (IANS): Global networking giant Cisco has begun a round of layoffs affecting employees across business units, which are part of an earlier "rebalancing effort".

According to verified Cisco employees on anonymous professional community forum Blind, some business units allegedly affected are Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Cisco Collaboration, Cisco Data Center Services & Solutions, Cisco Experience Centers (CxC), Cisco Security Business Group (SBG) Cisco Servers and Webex.

It was, however, unclear the number of jobs cut at Cisco. Dozens of former and current Cisco employees flooded social media with claims of internal layoffs announced this week.

“Got to know that my name is in the layoff list through a known Senior Manager who was in a meeting with my Director and frankly speaking, it’s such a toxic and controlling environment and I personally don’t want to work in that team. Little stressed as the job market is very dull,” a sacked employee wrote.

Another user said software engineers are being impacted at the company.

According to a comment, “many US-based directors are gone. DC is a growth market (ask Arista) yet Cisco is cutting knowledge loose”, another commented: “No, I think Collab China engineering is impacted the most this time (over 400 people).”

The company said in a statement to Fierce Telecom that these “recent notifications are part of the rebalancing effort we began in November 2022, which included a limited restructuring impacting our real estate portfolio and approximately 5 per cent of our workforce”.

Cisco’s last major round of layoffs impacted more than 4,000 employees in late 2022.

The layoffs in November were part of a $600 million restructuring plan.

The company said in a statement that "this rebalancing is about prioritising investments in our transformation, to meet and exceed our customers' expectations in the changing technology landscape”.