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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Monday that it will cut around 550 jobs — around 10% of its staff.

In a statement posted online, the lab’s director, Dave Gallagher, said the layoffs are part of a broad “realignment of its workforce” and not a result of the government shutdown.

The cuts will affect positions across the NASA center’s technical, business and support areas, he said.

“This week’s action, while not easy, is essential to securing JPL’s future by creating a leaner infrastructure, focusing on our core technical capabilities, maintaining fiscal discipline, and positioning us to compete in the evolving space ecosystem — all while continuing to deliver on our vital work for NASA and the nation,” he said.

Gallagher added that employees will be notified about their statuses Tuesday.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, is a research and development center that is federally funded by NASA but managed by the California Institute of Technology. It is where some of the space agency’s most iconic missions were built, including the United States’ first satellite, Explorer 1, which launched into space in 1958.

JPL scientists also designed, built and operated all five rovers that NASA has successfully landed on the surface of Mars.

NASA faces uncertainty over its budget and future priorities. Like most other government agencies, it has sustained major cuts to funding and personnel during the Trump administration — part of the push to shrink the federal workforce.

Around 4,000 NASA employees have accepted deferred resignation program offers since President Donald Trump took office, which reduced the space agency’s staff of 18,000 by nearly one-fifth.

In July, Reuters reported that around 2,145 senior-level employees at NASA were set to leave in the latest round of cuts.

Last week, as the government shutdown persisted, the Trump administration began laying off more than 4,000 federal workers across several other departments, including the Treasury Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. The cuts did not appear to affect NASA.

“Highly significant” cyber-attacks rose by 50% in the past year and the UK’s security services are now dealing with a new nationally significant attack more than every other day, figures from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) have revealed.

In what officials described as “a call to arms”, national security officials and ministers are urging all organisations, from the smallest businesses to the largest employers, to draw up contingency plans for the eventuality that “your IT infrastructure [is] crippled tomorrow and all your screens [go] blank”.

The NCSC, which is part of GCHQ, said “highly sophisticated” China, “capable and irresponsible” Russia, Iran and North Korea were the main state threats, in its annual review published on Tuesday. The rise is being driven by ransomware attacks, often by criminal actors seeking money, and society’s increasing dependence on technology which increases the number of hackable targets.

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the security minister, Dan Jarvis, and the technology and business secretaries, Liz Kendall and Peter Kyle have written to the leaders of hundreds of the largest British companies urging them to make cyber-resilience a board-level responsibility and warning that hostile cyber-activity in the UK has grown “more intense, frequent and sophisticated”.

“Don’t be an easy target,” said Anne Keast-Butler, the director of GCHQ. “Prioritise cyber risk management, embed it into your governance and lead from the top.”

NCSC dealt with 429 cyber incidents in the year to September and nearly half were classed as of national significance – more than doubling in the past year. Eighteen were “highly significant”, which means they had a serious impact on the government, essential services, the mass population or the economy. Most of those were ransomware incidents, including the attacks that significantly affected Marks & Spencer and the Co-op Group.

“Cybercrime is a serious threat to the security of our economy, businesses and people’s livelihoods,” said Jarvis. “While we work round the clock to counter threats and provide support to businesses of all sizes – we cannot do it alone.”

The NCSC declined to comment on reports that one line of investigation into the crippling attack on Jaguar Land Rover, which has halted manufacturing, is examining Russian involvement. It said Russia is inspiring informal “hacktivists” who are targeting the UK and the US, as well as European and Nato countries.

Overall, the number of attacks in the year to September represented the highest level of cyber threat activity recorded by the NCSC in nine years. Over the 12 month period, the UK and its allies uncovered a Russian military unit carrying out cyber-attacks for the first time, issued advice to counter a China-linked campaign targeting thousands of devices and raised the alarm over cyber-actors working for Iran, according to the NCSC. But the threat is also homegrown, and last week two 17-year-olds were arrested in Hertfordshire over the alleged ransomware hack of children’s data from the Kido nursery chain.

Hackers are also increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to sharpen their operations, and while the NCSC has yet to face an attack initiated by AI, it said: “AI will almost certainly pose cyber-resilience challenges to 2027 and beyond.”

“We do see our attackers improving their ability to cause real impact, to inflict pain on the organisations they have breached and those who rely on them,” said Richard Horne, the NCSC’s chief executive. “They don’t care who they hit or how they hurt them. That is why we need all organisations to act.”

He stressed the emotional impact of becoming a victim of cyber-attacks and said: “I’ve sat now in too many rooms with individuals who have been deeply affected by cyber-attacks against their organisations … I know the impact the disruption has on their staff, suppliers and customers, the worry, the sleepless nights.”