A ‘customer success story’: leaked documents show Cisco doubled down on Israeli military deals during Gaza war

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.