IBM layoffs

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IBM Layoffs: Thousands of Employees Affected
IBM is reportedly laying off thousands of employees this week, according to a report from The Register, which cites multiple sources. The company is attempting to keep these cuts under wraps.
The report indicates significant job reductions, with one insider stating that “a massive layoff” recently affected thousands of workers in the IBM Cloud division. These layoffs have been carried out discreetly, with employees required to sign non-disclosure agreements. "Unlike traditional layoffs, this one was done in secret. My manager told me that they were required to sign an NDA not to talk about the specifics,” one insider told the publication.
Although IBM has acknowledged workforce reductions, it has minimized the scale of the cuts. In its first-quarter 2024 earnings report, the company revealed a $400 million “workforce rebalancing” charge, suggesting that layoffs are part of its restructuring strategy. An IBM spokesperson told The Register, “Early this year, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge that would represent a very low single-digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we still expect to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with.”
Last year, CEO Arvind Krishna mentioned that IBM anticipated replacing about 7,800 jobs with artificial intelligence (AI), although he did not specify a timeline for these changes. However, analysts suggest that considering previous layoffs and the company’s current workforce size, the actual number of job cuts could be much higher than what IBM has officially disclosed. “This letter is to inform you that International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has announced a permanent reduction in force at its San Francisco location,” Lawrence Sposato, the company’s director of human resources in the United States, reportedly stated in a letter to the Employment Development Department (EDD), which was also made public by the agency.