RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Amidst an evaluation of its business priorities, Cisco has begun “a limited business restructuring impacting our real estate portfolio and approximately 5% of our workforce,” a spokesperson for the company told WRAL TechWire on Monday.

And, multiple people posting to layoffs discussion forum TheLayoff reported on Monday that they’d received official notice that their job had been cut.

The layoffs that began today were expected, though it had not previously been clear which workers would be impacted.  A former Cisco employee speaking on the condition of anonymity confirmed to WRAL News that layoffs have impacted workers at the company’s Research Triangle Park campus, but a company spokesperson declined to comment further on the number or extent of layoffs in the Triangle.

Last month, CEO Chuck Robbins said on an earnings call that the company would “rebalance” some business units following a report from the Silicon Valley Business Journal that indicated as many as 4,100 workers might be impacted by a $600 million restructuring plan.

And a company official confirmed to WRAL News in November that layoffs would be coming, but did not confirm where they would take place.

The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and a spokesperson said that the decision “is not about cost savings.”

“We will do everything we can to help place affected employees in other open roles,” the spokesperson said.  “We’ll have roughly the same number of employees at the end of the fiscal year as we had when we started.”

Cisco plans 4,100+ layoffs, moving some employees to open jobs in $600M restructuring

What’s happening

Multiple posters to the online forum TheLayoff note the layoffs happening at Cisco today.

One poster asked whether there was any confirmation that the layoffs would impact workers at the company’s Research Triangle Park campus, where it employs several thousand people.  The company has job openings posted for 187 roles that could be based in North Carolina, according to its careers webpage.

“Had the 1/1 meeting a bit ago. It was a director in my org, evidently my boss is also being affected,” one anonymous commenter wrote. “Anyhow, it was the most impersonal, un-empathetic script read call I’ve ever experienced. It was one massive run on sentence – to the point I couldn’t even interject to say something. Leadership should really rethink how these things happen – perhaps trained HR staff or as we all had to take interviewing training … some for leaders on how to have a humanistic conversation. Don’t need to be coddled but a little empathy would go a long ways.”

A source, a former Cisco employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told WRAL News that layoffs did impact some workers based at the RTP campus.

Some people are already posting on behalf of laid off workers on LinkedIn.

The company spokesperson told WRAL TechWire that employees who were laid off received “generous severance packages.”

~ WRAL reporter Keely Arthur contributed to this report