Cisco raced to repair infrastructure for Israeli military intelligence, leaks suggest

Cisco’s work with the Israeli military is back in the spotlight, with leaked documents suggesting the networking giant accrued some $67 million per year over three years working with the country’s military intelligence.

The Guardian obtained a trove of confidential internal documents from staff upset with Cisco’s work with Israeli military units. Among the revelations is that Splunk's subsidiary had pitched to be part of Project Nimbus , providing cloud services to Israeli government agencies.

Cisco, like many other big tech companies, worked with Israeli agencies long before military operations in Gaza began in the wake of October 2023. But according to The Guardian , Cisco rushed to repair its relationship with Israeli intelligence forces amid multihour outages caused by its equipment despite an estimated 70,000 largely civilian deaths in Gaza.

The report suggests that the networking giant raced to fix technical issues to critical network infrastructure that supposedly endangered agencies' access to military data. System updates that took place during the war supposedly “deeply impact[ed] customer sentiment” as the repeated outages “severely impacted critical operations.”

Described by internal documents as a “critical” account, Cisco reportedly mobilized multiple internal teams to fix bugs over a period of several months. Among the intelligence agencies Cisco sent staff to was a secretive Israeli military unit responsible for shifting critical infrastructure underground.

The leaks reportedly stated Cisco’s desire to restore “customer confidence” and reverse any “negative sentiment,” going as far as to describe damage control efforts as a “customer success story” in an internal presentation.

The Guardian ’s report follows a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finding of “reasonable cause” that Cisco subjected Muslim and Middle Eastern employees to a hostile work environment. Staff complained that in the wake of the October attacks by Hamas, repeated posts containing racist and Islamophobic content were posted to internal company messaging platforms, some of which were alleged to have celebrated the deaths of civilians. Posts by staff members who expressed concerns in an open letter regarding Cisco’s sales to the Israeli government, however, were allegedly removed from the platform, while individuals who spoke out were subjected to targeted posts.

Cisco disagreed with the EEOC’s findings, telling The Guardian it was committed to being an equal opportunity employer.

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