IBM employed roughly 378,000 people in 2015[1] and the actual number laid-off is closer to 14,000[2]. This represents 3.7% of the workforce. While layoffs are never great, most of these were from legacy systems as they have been attempting to hire 25,000 since that was announced[3].

IBM is a very large company and employs a great number of people. They have been transitioning from a hardware company to a services company and thus, many workers who specialized only in the older tech will be let go. I cannot speak for everyone, but (AFAIK) they were given opportunity to move elsewhere in the company.

To put the layoffs in context, Cisco is expected to lay off 14,000 workers (nearly 20% of its workforce), Walmart is laying off 17,500, and Seagate is laying off 8,100 by 2017 - 15.5% of its 2015 workforce[4].

1: http://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM_Annual_Report_2015.p...

2: http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-layoffs-continue-1463784692

3: http://fortune.com/2016/05/20/ibm-layoff-employees-may/

4: http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/08/19/12-companies-...