Leaked Cisco memos treat Israeli intelligence outages as a customer sentiment problem

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Current and former Cisco workers have objected to the company’s role in the Gaza war, calling it a ‘shocking and complete contradiction of values’. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images theguardian.com

A confidential Cisco memo drafted in September 2025 describes a series of multi-hour outages and repeated crashes that struck the networks of Israel's military intelligence community about a year into the war in Gaza. 'This series of events happened during the period of war, deeply impacting customer sentiment,' the memo reads. 'During a period of national conflict, these repeated outages severely impacted critical operations.'

The memo comes from a trove of internal documents leaked by Cisco workers furious at the company's ties to Israel's military and reviewed by the Guardian. The outages began while the intelligence agencies were updating their digital infrastructure; built-in debugging mechanisms failed, and the incidents undermined the agencies' confidence in one of their top network providers. The documents show the company working to preserve and expand the relationship as the war continued. Israeli military intelligence contracts alone generated about 67 million dollars over three years, according to a 2025 document, and Splunk, the Cisco-owned platform for analysing machine-generated data, pitched earlier this year to join Project Nimbus, the cloud contract between the Israeli government, Google and Amazon.

The war has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, and international organisations and governments have begun referring to Israel's actions as genocide. Cisco, which sells the routers, servers and communications systems that move data for companies, governments and militaries worldwide, has drawn less scrutiny than other technology giants — a group of current and former employees, Bridge to Humanity, wrote that 'Cisco has been able to skate under the radar because they sell hardware and software.' The group called the work with Israeli intelligence 'a shocking and complete contradiction of values Cisco sells to us employees and externally to its customers, investors, and the public,' and described the company as 'an instrument of genocide.'

The Israeli military said it is assisted by services from a range of companies and does not comment on contracts. Cisco, which pitches itself internally and to the public as an ethics-driven company, did not respond to a request for comment.