IBM is reportedly cutting jobs in an attempt to maintain…

IBM is reportedly cutting thousands of jobs this week. According to a report in The Register, IBM is laying off a significant number of employees this week and is trying to keep it a secret, the report claims its sources have said. The report, citing multiple sources, says the company is quietly cutting jobs, with one insider claiming that “massive layoffs” recently affected thousands of employees in IBM’s Cloud division.
The layoffs were conducted in secret, with employees required to sign non-disclosure agreements. “Unlike traditional layoffs, this was done in secret,” the source said. “My manager told me they had to sign an NDA to keep the details secret,” the report quotes the affected IBM employee as saying.

IBM confirms job cuts

While IBM has acknowledged the job cuts, it has downplayed the scale of the cuts. In its first-quarter 2024 earnings report, the company disclosed a $400 million “workforce rebalancing” charge, indicating the layoffs are part of its restructuring efforts. An IBM spokesperson told The Register: “Earlier this year, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge that would have been a very low single-digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we still expect to end 2024 with roughly the same headcount that we entered with.”
Last year, CEO Arvind Krishna said IBM plans to replace about 7,800 jobs with artificial intelligence, but no specific time frame was given.
However, given previous job cuts and the current size of the company’s workforce, analysts estimate the number of layoffs could be significantly higher than IBM has publicly reported.
“This letter is to inform you that International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has announced permanent job cuts at its (San Francisco) facility,” Lawrence Sposato, the company’s U.S. human resources director, said in a letter to the Employment Development Department (EDD), which was also made public by the agency.