Cisco's $283 million Israel business puts its military ties under scrutiny
Internal documents reveal how Cisco rushed engineers to Israeli military intelligence facilities after technical failures threatened a $67 million business relationship. The company's deep involvement in defense and intelligence infrastructure has also triggered employee protests and a shareholder challenge over its human-rights policies.
Cisco rushed senior executives and engineering teams to Israeli military facilities after repeated technical failures threatened a military intelligence business that generated approximately $67 million over three years. Internal documents reveal how the networking giant worked to preserve and expand its relationship with Israel's defense establishment during the Gaza war, even as the disruptions undermined customer confidence and employees challenged the company's involvement.
The problems included outages lasting several hours, repeated system crashes and failures in built-in diagnostic mechanisms. They emerged as Israeli intelligence agencies were upgrading their digital infrastructure and became serious enough that intelligence leaders threatened to cancel the business, according to documents obtained by The Guardian.
“This series of events happened during the period of war, deeply impacting customer sentiment,” warned a confidential Cisco memo drafted in September 2025. “During a period of national conflict, these repeated outages severely impacted critical operations.”
The documents, leaked by Cisco employees opposed to the company's ties to Israel's military, offer an unusually detailed account of the efforts a global technology supplier undertook to protect a sensitive customer relationship. Employees familiar with the technical problems told The Guardian that the outages endangered intelligence personnel's access to military data. The documents do not identify specific military operations affected by the disruptions.
Cisco responded by activating senior executives and mobilizing multiple internal teams over several months to address the failures. It also sent employees to meet with Sapir, a secretive Israeli military technology unit, under stringent security conditions because of the ongoing war. Internal documents indicate that the technical problems were resolved sometime between 2024 and the summer of 2025. Cisco subsequently described the effort as a “customer success story,” saying the client was satisfied and had returned to “business as usual.”
Sapir operates communications and computing infrastructure within Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate and is responsible for managing and protecting its main data center, which hosts major intelligence organizations including Unit 8200. The unit was also reportedly involved in moving Israel's intelligence apparatus underground after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The documents do not establish that the relocation caused the technical failures.
The episode illustrates the extent to which Cisco has become embedded in Israel's military infrastructure. The company, best known for the networking equipment and software that move data across corporate, government and military systems, has worked with the Israeli security establishment for years. According to a 2025 document reviewed by The Guardian, contracts with Israeli military intelligence alone generated approximately $67 million in business over three years.
That relationship is part of a much larger Israeli operation. Cisco Israel's revenue increased from $122 million in fiscal 2015 to $283 million in 2024. In the first half of 2024, business with the Defense Ministry accounted for approximately $98 million of total Israeli revenue of around $150 million.
The expansion of Cisco's military business has not translated into uninterrupted revenue growth. An internal presentation comparing the first halves of 2023, 2024 and 2025 shows that Cisco Israel's total revenue fell from $150 million in the first half of 2024 to $115 million in the same period of 2025. Revenue from the Israeli Ministry of Defense dropped even more sharply, from $98 million to $42 million. The figures suggest that the Defense Ministry's contribution to Cisco's Israeli business fell by more than half, although the presentation does not explain the reasons for the decline.
An internal document from April 2021 described Cisco's services as essential to the IDF, comparing their importance to “aircrafts, tanks and any other essential military tools.” The company also characterized itself as the Defense Ministry's dominant information and communications technology partner. At the time, its account covered 10 classified organizations and represented approximately half of Cisco Israel's revenue.
The company's internal assessments also reflected the commercial opportunities it saw in the conflict. A 2024 presentation categorized $111 million in Israeli revenue as “conflict impact” and included a slide carrying the phrase “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” incorrectly attributed to Winston Churchill. The presentation identified potential opportunities worth $50 million for an artificial intelligence computing project and another $15 million for a routed optical-network project.
In the days following the October 7 attack, CEO Chuck Robbins told employees that Cisco was working “day and night” to send technology to Israel, including specialized cybersecurity capabilities requested by Israeli officials. The documents obtained by The Guardian also describe dozens of deals the company pursued in 2026 with Israeli government bodies, intelligence agencies, the Air Force and the Navy. Many were tagged as AI-related projects, reflecting demand for greater computing and data-processing capacity.
The commercial push extended to Splunk, the data-analysis company Cisco acquired in 2024 for approximately $28 billion. Splunk processes and analyzes large volumes of machine-generated data, helping organizations identify technical failures and cybersecurity threats. Earlier in 2026, executives at the Cisco subsidiary sought to participate in Project Nimbus, the Israeli government's cloud-computing initiative with Google and Amazon. The documents do not establish whether the effort resulted in a deal.
Project Nimbus, awarded to Google and Amazon in 2021, is valued at approximately $1.2 billion. The Israeli National Digital Agency has used Splunk for years and in September published a notice of intent to extend the arrangement through a NIS 12 million agreement. An earlier government document said officials had evaluated Google's Chronicle platform as a possible replacement under Nimbus, but concluded at the time that it did not meet their analytical, operational and security requirements.
Cisco's role is significant beyond the value of its own contracts. Its networking equipment and infrastructure provide the underlying systems through which data is transmitted and processed, including in environments that rely on cloud services supplied by other technology companies. The relationship has received less public attention than the military business of Microsoft, Google and Amazon, but the documents suggest that Cisco occupies an important position in the technological infrastructure supporting Israel's security establishment.
That position has also made the company a target of internal opposition. Bridge to Humanity, a group of current and former Cisco employees critical of its work with Israel, has accused management of pursuing military business in contradiction to the company's public commitments to human rights.
The group described Cisco's work with Israeli intelligence as a “shocking and complete contradiction of values Cisco sells to us employees and externally to its customers, investors, and the public.” It also argued that the company's provision of technology to the military made it “no different to an arms company that is supplying the bombs and fighter jets”.
In 2024, more than 1,700 employees signed a letter calling on Cisco to disclose its ties to Israel and stop supplying technology to the IDF. The campaign was accompanied by allegations of harassment targeting Muslim and Palestinian employees.
The tensions are now reaching Cisco's shareholders. Azzad Asset Management, a U.S. investment firm that manages Shariah-compliant portfolios and holds Cisco shares on behalf of clients, has proposed that the company commission an independent, third-party assessment of the human-rights risks associated with its business relationships. The proposal covers high-risk customers and end users, including those involved in military, intelligence, surveillance and sensitive government activities.
Cisco's board has recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal, arguing that the company already conducts risk-based human-rights due diligence and impact assessments. The proposal has also drawn opposition from the Anti-Defamation League and JLens, which have urged shareholders to reject it. They argue that although the wording is broadly framed around human rights, the supporting case focuses heavily on Israel and overlaps with the objectives of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Cisco did not respond to The Guardian's questions about the internal documents. The IDF said it uses services from a range of companies to meet its ongoing needs and objectives, but does not comment on contracts or services provided by external entities.
