It feels like something that IBM regularly does, similar to Cisco's revolving lay-off cycles. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland has a part where the protagonist's father is fired from IBM after being there for years.
Well, Microserfs was written in 1994, just after IBM's 1993 cataclysm where Lou Gerstner was hired to save the company and immediately fired 160,000 people. That was very much a one-off event.