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. 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 somewhere 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 2023 to $122 million in the same period of 2025.