The news comes just weeks after Big Blue announced the culling of up to a third of its staff in the US in what was described as a "mass firing". One soon-to-be former IBM employee spoke to IEEE Spectrum about the situation. He said: "It is bad, really bad. It's a mass lay-off today. It is a sad day for IBM. People are being told not to talk about it. I was told by a manager in getting the news [of my job being made redundant], who was reading off of a script, that one third of the US workforce is being 'rebalanced,' which is what they call it."