Tech giant leaped to shore up relationship even as company was roiled by worker protest over its role in the war

A year into the war in Gaza, the networks of Israel’s military intelligence community were plagued with technical problems. There were major, multi-hour outages to their systems, and repeated crashes. Built-in debugging mechanisms failed.

The problems, which started as intelligence operations were undergoing updates to digital infrastructure, became so persistent as to undermine the “confidence” of Israeli intelligence agencies in one of their top network providers: the multinational tech conglomerate Cisco.

“This series of events happened during the period of war, deeply impacting customer sentiment,” warned a confidential memo drafted by Cisco and obtained by the Guardian. “During a period of national conflict, these repeated outages severely impacted critical operations.”

The September 2025 draft memo was part of a trove of internal documents leaked by Cisco workers furious with the company’s ties to Israel’s military three years into the war, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians.

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While Cisco’s involvement with Israel’s military before and since 2023 has been documented before, the leaked documents obtained by the Guardian reveal the lengths the company went to in order to preserve and expand the relationship as the war in Gaza dragged on.

They also show that earlier this year, Splunk – a Cisco subsidiary platform that can process and analyze massive volumes of machine-generated data – made a pitch to join the controversial cloud computing contract between the Israeli government, Google and Amazon known as Project Nimbus.

Cisco pursued these opportunities as the mass killing of civilians in Gaza was amply documented, international organizations and governments began to refer to Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and the company itself was roiled by internal turmoil over its own role in the war.