Video taking off 8.6x its usual first day

Asianometry traces the phantom orders behind Cisco's telecom bust

The video essay explains how a company with a real-time view of its order book still mistook duplicate purchases for lasting demand.

Channel:

Asianometry Story of November 10, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 85,502 views a day, 8.6 times a normal first day on this channel (9,891).

How Cisco Got Bullwhipped

Things we can learn from the video

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1:52Bill Yeager's multiprotocol router at Stanford provides the technical foundation for Cisco's beginnings.
9:52Cisco outsources manufacturing to assemblers, keeping its own operations relatively asset-light.
12:17Real-time accounting and supplier access to order books promise tighter coordination across the business.
22:01Component shortages and long delivery times push Cisco into heavy inventory commitments.
26:14Chambers discovers customers have placed duplicate orders through resellers, inflating the apparent demand.
28:13Cancellations leave Cisco announcing layoffs and a huge inventory write-off; manufacturers suffer losses too.

Cisco could see its orders coming in. What it couldn't see was how many represented the same customers trying more than one route to get scarce equipment.

That distinction sits at the heart of Asianometry's "How Cisco Got Bullwhipped", which drew an estimated 85,000 views in its first day, more than eight times the channel's usual start. The essay follows the networking company's rise through the internet boom, then explains how an apparently reassuring backlog could disappear.

The setup makes the reversal especially interesting. Cisco wasn't running on paper ledgers and guesswork. Asianometry describes an outsourced manufacturing network, online business sales and systems that let suppliers look directly at the company's order book. Information moved quickly. That didn't make the information reliable.

As components became harder to obtain and delivery times stretched, customers placed duplicate orders through resellers. Cisco committed to more inventory to meet what looked like growing demand. When spending dried up and customers canceled, the company was left holding equipment the market no longer wanted.

The title's bullwhip is that amplification: distorted demand signals traveling through a supply chain and producing much larger commitments upstream. The essay reaches its sharpest turn when John Chambers discovers the phantom orders, followed by layoffs and a multibillion-dollar inventory write-off.

In the comments, viewers are picking apart the difference between orders and actual demand. Some draw comparisons with AI infrastructure spending, while others bring memories of working at Cisco or learning to run its networking equipment. Those comparisons are viewers' interpretations; the historical story ends with a distinction of its own: Cisco survived on its cash reserves, but its manufacturing partners also bore the fallout.

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What viewers say

Cisco’s mistake was treating customer orders as a reliable signal of actual demand. In a supply chain with long lead times, duplicated orders can create an illusion of growth that disappears overnight. Better supply chain visibility might have mattered more than simply increasing production capacity.
@SiliconNodeReportsSee it on YouTube
I was there 1994-1999. I worked with the woman who answered the ad at 4:12, employee #7. My boss was the guy who designed the 2500. I don't recognize today's tech industry.
@toiyabe_effectSee it on YouTube
Stanford was the place to be - three years earlier our school was using punch cards and networking was 300 baud acoustic coupled, may have even been rotary dial but memory of that fades :)
@ChuckSwigerSee it on YouTube

2 more comments

Thank you, Jon.
You are indirectly filling in the background of the computer industry
and my career in airborne geophysical surveying.
@bobgroves5777See it on YouTube
I lived through this and worked in the industry - it so reminds me of today.
@markbriggs5531See it on YouTube

Public comments from the video's page on YouTube