IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

Resource Actions expected to hit half of US Infrastructure group

IBM this week began notifying several thousand employees that they will be laid off, according to sources familiar with the matter. 

These Resource Action (RA) notifications tell staff that they have 30 days to find another position within the company or they will be let go, with a few months of severance pay. Most of those on notice will not find new positions and will leave the company.

We've heard from insiders and former employees that the target headcount reduction is about 45 percent within IBM's US infrastructure group. 

Another source said more than 50 percent of IBM's US Cloud group – which is part of the Infrastructure organization under SVP Ric Lewis – is expected to be let go.

Two former employees who still have contacts within the company speculated that the cuts are likely a result of middling results in the cloud business, and Lewis's promise of profitability in the infrastructure business this year. Another current employee cited IBM's practice of offshoring jobs from the US and Europe to India, and spoke of feeling exhausted from the specter of layoffs and RAs.

While many IBMers continue to believe that jobs cut in the US often get rehired in India, one of our sources suggests that's unlikely to happen with this round of cuts.

Anonymous reports of RAs have started to surface on forums like The Layoff and Reddit.

IBM did not respond to our requests to confirm what we've been told and to share details. The company had about 270,300 employees worldwide at the end of 2024 but does not publish headcounts for its respective divisions.

In a statement to Bloomberg, an IBM spokesperson said, "In the fourth quarter we are executing an action that will impact a low single-digit percentage of our global workforce."

So, at 1 percent or 2 percent of the company's global workforce, the cuts would range from 2,700 to 5,400 workers.

According to the company's IRS Form 5500 disclosures with the US Labor Department, Big Blue had 49,030 total active participants in its 401K plan at the end of 2024, down from 52,674 at the end of 2023. And the company reported 50,667 participants in its employee benefit plan in 2024. Presumably these figures offer an approximation of its US labor force.

In 2002, IBM had about 160,000 US employees.

IBM last month reported [PDF] profits of $1.7 billion on $16.3 billion in revenue for Q3 2025, a revenue increase of 9 percent. The company's Infrastructure reporting segment, which includes the IBM Z mainframe unit, distributed infrastructure, and infrastructure support, delivered revenues of $3.6 billion, up 17 percent, with gross profit margins of 57.2%.

IBM presently has 2,840 job openings in India, 376 in the US, 228 in Japan, 225 in the Philippines, 127 in the UK, 112 in Canada, and 96 in Mexico. 

Other tech companies have also been shedding workers recently, most notably Amazon, which said last month it expects to cut 14,000 jobs. Oracle also did so. ®