Enterprise network technology vendor F5 expects a recent nation-state cyberattack to affect its revenues as customers hesitate to sign or renew contracts with the firm following the intrusion.
“Given the visibility that this security incident has had, it would be natural that in some of our customers … we may see some delays of approvals or delays of deals,” F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou told investors during an earnings call on Monday.
F5, which sells application delivery and security software and hardware, announced in mid-October that a nation-state — subsequently reported to be China — had breached its computer networks and maintained long-term access to development and engineering platforms. The hackers accessed information about vulnerabilities that F5 was in the process of evaluating, prompting the company to issue emergency patches. The company said there was no evidence that the hackers had tampered with its source code or supply chain.
F5 said on Monday that it expected revenue growth in fiscal 2026 to be anywhere from flat to 4%, below the roughly 9% that analysts had predicted.
Locoh-Donou told investors that F5 expected some customers to delay purchasing decisions as they sought “to be reassured that their project should move forward” in light of the hack. He said the financial fallout from the incident would mostly be limited to new contracts rather than renewals.
“We are disappointed that this happened and very aware as a team and as a company of the burden that this has placed [on] our customers who have had to work long hours to upgrade their BIG-IPs and secure their environment,” Locoh-Donou said.
When F5 announced the breach, it said the nation-state hackers had stolen data about the network configurations of a limited number of customers. On Monday, Locoh-Donou said F5 had finished consulting with those customers about the stolen data. “The most common feedback from customers so far has been that that data is not sensitive and they’re not concerned about it,” he told investors.
F5 CFO Cooper Werner said the company was already ramping up its cybersecurity spending, having more than doubled it over the past three years, with additional investments planned prior to the hack. “We’ve learned a lot in the last several weeks,” he said, “and so there’s some additional investments incorporated into our planning.”
So far, Locoh-Donou said, the company has not seen any financial fallout from the hack, but “it is very early days because this was disclosed only two weeks ago.”
