New York, January 9, 2026, 15:05 EST — Regular session
Cisco Systems (CSCO.O) shares rose about 0.5% to $74.32 in afternoon trading on Friday, as investors weighed fresh reports of glitches in some of the company’s switches and a separate round of security fixes. The stock has traded between $73.17 and $74.32 in the session.
For Cisco, a big supplier of corporate networking gear, outages and security flaws can turn into urgent patch work for customers and uncomfortable questions about product quality. Even if the financial hit is small, the headlines can linger.
The stock move also came as Wall Street pushed higher after a softer-than-expected December jobs report kept rate-cut expectations in play. “Investors are getting granular and picking the winners and losers,” said Zachary Hill, head of portfolio management at Horizon Investments.
BleepingComputer reported that multiple Cisco switch models began entering reboot loops after logging fatal DNS client errors, starting around 2 a.m., with some devices failing while trying to resolve “www.cisco.com” and time servers. The outlet said administrators reported workarounds such as disabling DNS resolution or time synchronization settings.
Separately, Cisco has released updates to address a medium-severity flaw in Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector, according to The Hacker News. The issue is tracked as CVE-2026-20029 — a CVE is a public identifier for a vulnerability — and it carries a CVSS severity score of 4.9; Cisco said proof-of-concept exploit code is available, though there were no indications of in-the-wild exploitation.
Cisco ended Thursday at $73.96, down from $74.72 a day earlier, according to its investor relations site’s historical quote data.
But it is still hard to gauge how widespread the switch problems are, or whether the security issues lead to anything beyond routine patching. If the disruptions prove broader than early reports suggest — or if exploitation emerges — the narrative can shift fast.
Investors will be watching for any formal update from Cisco on the switch issue and the pace of customer patching. Cisco’s next quarterly report is estimated for Feb. 11, based on Nasdaq’s earnings calendar, when attention is likely to turn back to demand signals and guidance.
