I interned at Nortel in early 2000's right before it all went down. I can tell you the engineering culture was rotten within. No-one was doing anything useful for years. Many orgs were built around milking the ancient layer 2 passport switch. The layer 3 router meant to compete with Cisco was 3 years late and only sold a few dozen units. There was accounting fraud going on at the highest level - delivery trucks circles around to pad the books.
I'm sure the hack happened. I just don't think it would had made any material impact - there was simply not much to steal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was also there as an intern around the same time.
It was an insane place to get my first "office job" experience. Entire buildings of hundreds of people all working on powerpoint reports about potential training ideas for future projects to improve the production of the powerpoint presentations made to summarize the reports on internal "sales" numbers that are then filed without anyone reading them because everyone knew they were too fudged to matter and the internal competition thing was a smokescreen for fraud anyway. Who was embezzling what this week were conversations coop students got to overhear.
I was there shortly before the whole thing collapsed and right before it did, in my department, there was a lot of boat shopping combined with clock watching as they waited for options to vest before the whole thing fell apart (everyone knew it would soon).
We killed our own telecommunications industry by first throwing it into a massive bubble and then starving the shit out of it.
It wasn't killed by spying Chinese communist; if anything it was killed by the flipside of our capitalist system. The "madness of crowds" that drives "hot" industries through periods of massive over-investment followed by massive under-investment.
Sounds like it was badly miss managmed. Better companies outsold it, causing it to file bankruptcy.
This is one of the points of capitalism, Bad / wasteful decisions lead to failure. Better managed companies rise. Consumers get better products cheaper.
I'm sure it looks like that inside many big companies. There's a reason that FAANG+ companies fought over Nortel's patent trove. Nortel tech is still in a lot of today's most valuable products, covering things from BGA routing techniques to wireless communications. The area still supports an ecosystem of small manufacturers of world-leading optics and photonics components. That says something, at least.
Someone I worked with in 1006 who I think was at Bay Networks and jumped ship to Cisco had similar feelings about Nortel. Nothing about China, but it was already a sinking ship.
I'm sure the hack happened. I just don't think it would had made any material impact - there was simply not much to steal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯