> The packages for departing employees will include the equivalent of their full base pay through the end of 2026. Healthcare coverage is different across the globe, and if you’re in the United States, we’ll continue to provide support through the end of the year. We are also vesting equity for departing team members through August 15th, so they receive stock beyond their departure date. And, if departing team members haven’t hit their one-year cliffs, we are going to waive those and vest their pro-rated equity through August as well.
The announcement reads as pretty heartless to me, but this is a very, very nice departure package
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are something like 95% profit.
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
Welp, looks like I’m affected. If anyone is looking to hire a systems engineer with distributed systems and load balancing experience, shoot me an email at <anything>@piperswe.me :/
I'm going to start calling these "Canary" moments.
Assuming we take everything at face value for these sorts of cuts, it creates the following scenario:
A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI while also posting substantial profit or revenue growth. The company could downsize the workforce to capitalize on short-term efficiencies and increase margins, though this will come at the cost of long-term reputational harm due to posted profits/health as well as burning out staff who must do the same (or increasingly, more) work with less headcount, leading to attrition when the market shifts in their favor. Alternatively, it could leverage this surplus labor for a period of moonshot R&D or paying down technical/process debts while they have the capacity and the profit to pay for it, which harms short-term share price relative to their competitors slashing jobs, while improving the company's capabilities in the marketplace in the long-run, potentially through mastery of these AI tools or the creation of new product lines.
The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.
Vague overtones on AI savings without any hard evidence that’s happening, while ignoring obvious evidence that the company over-hired and is now underperforming relative to what would be needed to justify all that headcount.
Nobody believes these narratives at this point and CEOs would garner a lot more respect if they just simply said
“I screwed up, we hired too many people and fell short of performance targets. I own that. This resets us back on track.”
There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't. Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it.
I know it's probably automatic because of the similar titles, but hitting the bottom of the layoff announcement only to be recommended that article about hiring 1,111 interns in 2026 is a reaaal bad look
Their AI costs have increased 600% but this hasn't translated into actual revenue. Also they are probably projecting AI costs to keep growing. They've done the math and at some point it is going to affect their bottom line.
Reducing or limiting AI usage would be inconceivable given Cloudflare itself has invested on AI and is selling AI services. Instead they've opted for reducing about 20% of their head count.
The job market is already brutal for many candidates, especially people who aren’t social media personalities and don’t have names like Cloudflare, Meta, Amazon, or Google on their CVs. Some people will end up homeless...
At least having Cloudflare on their resume will likely help many of these people land new opportunities, so I wouldn’t be too worried about their long-term prospects...
What I don’t fully understand is why a company like Cloudflare decides to let experienced people go under the umbrella of “reorganisation.” Couldn’t some of them be given the opportunity to adapt to new priorities or ways of working?
What exactly is so fundamentally difficult in 2026 that someone with years of experience can’t learn?
Of course, large organisations sometimes develop dysfunctional habits. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the case here, but common examples include:
1. Problems that a motivated engineer could solve in minutes instead turn into meetings scheduled a week later, followed by more meetings.
2. People are becoming so process-oriented or conservative that they reject new approaches by default (Not even trying things out, and I don't mean migrating to a new fancy framework)
3. Engineers losing touch with product thinking and customer impact.
And if the explanation is cost-cutting, it’s fair to ask where companies choose to spend money elsewhere, e.g. unlimited LLM token usage with little accountability, extravagant off-sites, flying thousands of employees to expensive locations, etc.
Finally, why do they keep hundreds of job openings on their careers page? Are those false job descriptions wasting candidates' time?
The AI argument doesn't make sense to me for layoffs. If AI is making the company more productive then there's an incredible opportunity to use the existing workforce to tackle the massive backlog of important work. A big layoff only makes sense if there is no more useful work to do or you're killing products.
It's such a bad time to be laid off right now. The competition is ridiculous. I have to compete with like 100k world class employees. Best wishes cloudflare former employees. I hope some of you make new companies and hire other geeks who are on their butts. A lot of us at other companies got the boot with no severance or early stock vestings. It could be worse!
I dislike the title because it doesn't clearly state it's a layoff. "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative with a roadmap outlining plans.
It looks like they are using the "agentic AI era" as an excuse to restructure in order to boost margins. GAAP gross margin dropped ~5 points YoY (76% -> 71%)
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
Clearly if AI were the productivity booster that we're told it is, you'd see hiring into it, not firing. Though I guess on the call Prince did say he expect end '27 to have more employees than for any of '26. Anyway.
Except for one small, very tiny, itsy-bitsy problem. We humans are very bad at understand the second and third order effects of events. Really, really bad. First order consequences: "Oh we don't need people anymore".
Do I know the second order effects? Probably not. But at least I know they will be there.
Letting go 1,100 people into a bleak job market. Absolutely awful.
It wouldn't shock me if people formerly in tech have changed careers entirely, seemingly every tech-focused company is laying people off in favour of AI.
Cutting salaries to pay the AI costs for the remaining engineers. Going to be rough as this trickles through the entire economy over the next 10 years.
Makes sense to do these things. To realistically make it through this paradigm shift you need to organize into a thing that can exploit it. That inevitably requires eliminating teams that don't fit into the new picture. The severance package seems quite generous. Hope everyone lands on their feet.
It's not that individuals are not useful, or even that their roles are not useful. It's that you have to structure your organization to be able to exploit a coming wave, and existing mechanisms and operations just get in the way. By the time Netflix shut down the DVD business it was making $80 m in revenue and the margins on that business were some 50%. But if you think the writing is on the wall, you're forced to act.
Doesn't mean the people in the DVD-mail-ops sides were bad at what they do. The world had just changed and the business became different.
"We are reorganizing for the agentic AI era" reads better than "our gross margin is compressing, our SBC is too high, and our growth is decelerating." Both descriptions could be true; only one gets you a flattering blog post.
I interviewed at cloudflare in ~2020 and didn’t get the job - everyone I met during the process seemed really smart and kind though. Would love to work with some of those people
Email me subject “cloudflare” if interested - thomas@ our domain (I am the cofounder)
My response to this, as a generally satisfied CloudFlare customer who was excited to try out agentic email, is that it's not a good time to increase the amount of business I do with them.
Worst part about the ai era is that so many are convinced they can and need to be on top of it to the extent of losing their core competency while mass producing trash
It’s good stuff but there’s room for a lot of things
A few people here have been impacted, so I want to talk about something constructive that could help them. As someone observing industry trends from the outside for a while, my advice to those looking to get hired these days: Build something useful from scratch – on your own –- that you can show off as soon as possible.
The buzzword everyone is looking for is "high-agency." (No, not those agents, but yes, those will help.) Basically employers want someone who will start something from scratch and take it to the finish line by themselves.
The interesting thing about this is, it is by definition not something you can put on your resume; It is something you show, not tell.
Yes, you need to do this even as you go through the absolute hell that is a job search. But trust me, this will a) help get a much better job, and b) help in the long run throughout and beyond your career. This will be the most valuable skill in the future.
You don’t need to use AI, but looking at the timeframes and skills in demand, yes, you very likely want to use AI.
A few other thoughts:
1. Target an area you are very familiar with. This will sharply cut down the time to MVP. This will be a challenge for the more junior folks, who should consider reaching out to senior mentors. Mentors, consider outsourcing a suitable personal project to them.
2. It could be something you are an expert on at work, if your employment contract and IP laws allow. As a bonus, releasing this as open source, or even a competing product if you’re so inclined, will have that intangible bonus of sticking it to your ex-employer.
3. Even if heavily using AI, keep your hands-on skill active. Most companies still do old-school leetcode interviews.
4. Bonus if you do something multi-disciplinary. Sprinkle in a domain you have no background in -- design, writing, sales, marketing, data science, frontend, whatever. You'll definitely need AI for this, and even when you make mistakes, few will harshly judge somebody down on their luck trying to expand their boundaries.
With the hiring 1111 interns thing, I think these companies (amazon as well) need to realize this is doing anything but inspiring confidence in those interns. Instead of being excited about going there, more of them would opt to go elsewhere instead of returning full time, or if they do return full time they'd be in fear of being let go next.
I don't see how laying people off isn't inherently and always a "cost-cutting exercise." If they had an unlimited budget, they probably wouldn't be laying them off, right?
Maybe it's supposed to mean that it's not... something more specific?
Any other engineers just living life frozen at this point. I am unable to make any life decisions because it seems like I won't have a career in the near future. I am unable to purchase a home to settle down for my family, because dad might not have a job next week. I know I am fortunate to have a job, many don't, but fuck if this career isn't the worse thing ever for my overall health and happiness.
I'm sure this is going to happen a lot to big companies, with AI they are all going to find they have too much staff and are not likely to benefit from a higher pace of development. Smaller/Mid size companies on the other hand are likely limited in how much staff they can take on and AI just accelerates their plans (I'm in a company like this).
That's 2 major layoffs this week (Coinbase being the other). Is there an underlying common reason for this? And is it indeed AI-driven productivity as both companies claim?
At this point, the thread has over 700+ comments, but if any impacted Cloudflare folks see this and are interested in working on the same shape of problems, Fastly posted our "Who's Hiring?" for May at this link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975839
Happy to answer any questions, though I only check HN about once a day.
Not sure how to feel about this. On one hand, the transparency about the layoff and the severance package for the employees are positive things.
But seeing the intern hiring count the year before basically offsetting the layoff headcount makes me think they've been planning to replace their employees with interns and plug the expertise gap with AI.
Really sorry to see the news about the RIF. My thoughts are with everyone affected.
If you (or someone you know) were impacted and want to stay in the distributed systems or data plane space, we’re doing a lot of work at Kong ($2B valuation API & AI governance company) on high-performance proxies, control planes, and Rust, Golang, etc. (I used to work on Cloudflare's edge proxy project)
Happy to chat about the roles or just the tech stack in general if you want to geek out. Feel free to reach out: datong#konghq.com
Companies like cloudflare operate at a very critical spot as of today. They manage the end points where TLS terminates for most of the internet traffic which means that they have access to all the information flowing through them in clear. When a company is so much motivated by the profits then it would not be too far away when they start selling all this information. With this much centralized control, they can easily turn to abusers instead of being internet gatekeepers for profit. Firing so many people is bound to disrupt the operations, the only question is how much can they can hide/manage.
Wow, and I had thought they would be one of the winners in the AI era. A lot of SaaS's can be recreated with an agent and some tokens, but I thought the more infra-y companies would be the beneficiaries. I've vibe coded a few Cloudflare Workers and thought it was a great experience. And Claude knew how to use wrangler to do a lot itself.
You have however many people who you seem to believe have no useful work to do in their current roles. You aren't bleeding money. Is that not the time to invest in new products? To take moonshots?
Is this not admitting that they simply can't come up with any new ideas to invest in? That their intellectual capacity has topped out?
Profitable companies laying people off like this tells me they're done innovating and now it is time to milk the cash cows for all they're worth.
Isn't the most likely explanation here that they needed to show in their earnings call how their bet on becoming AI infrastructure is leading to high revenue growth expectations, and that isn't happening (yet)?
The stock is currently at -17% in after hours trading.
So you need to do something that's good for your margins to show investors.
TBH I'm surprised people don't see the obvious result of this collective madness:
1. Force every engineer to use agentic AI to the max.
2. Constant anxiety at work due to the threat of job loss and unreasonable expectations from management/business.
3. Engineers start yoloing everything using AI while wasting tokens.
4. Speed goes up in the short term, while quality and expertise degrade little by little, all while bleeding money due to AI usage.
5. One year down the line you have a company full of engineers that don't care and a bunch of slop-bloated, bug-ridden products that the customers don't want, and a massive bill.
IDGI. How is a company that owns a bunch of infrastructure you almost have to use to put your service on the internet not more profitable such that they have to do layoffs?
Screw Cloudflare. I went through a bizarre 3+ months hiring process where I would have a disconnected, vague 30 minute interview with someone every couple weeks. Then, suddenly rejected for no real reason given.
Sorry to everyone affected by this. If any infra/platform folks in Europe are looking, Luxonis is hiring a Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer. It’s remote in Europe, focused on cloud infrastructure and internal developer platform work for spatial AI / computer vision products:
https://www.luxonis.com/about-us#devops-engineer
Why are they laying off anyone when you got 500 million plus in pure profit. The tax system needs to be reworked to not incentivize layoffs. Major taxes should happen to support the well fair system in order to support people laid off. This is a stupid system we live in.
I feel like they overhired over the years and now they reap what they sow. AI just accelerated their awareness of overhiring. I think if Cloudflare or any other well established software company stopped hiring this year, they would be doing the same as they did last year. At the end even the management will be replaced by AI.
All the AI stuff is just noise to make it sound better - the real issue is the economic downturn.
If anything, AI makes each employee much more valuable because they can be much more productive and most big companies always have stuff that needs doing and opportunities for growth. So it's a sort of Jevons Paradox[1] situation but where human labour is the resource.
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
So basically, there were too many people burning too many tokens lol
Their stock has gone down nearly 20% in early trading today. When layoffs happen, usually it is the opposite, so I imagine Matthew Prince must be annoyed!
I am disappointed by this decision from Cloudflare. I've always felt that massive layoffs are something that companies who are greedy and don't care about their employees do (like Amazon and Meta). Up until now, my impression of Cloudflare has been that they care about their societal impact to an extent and still share old values from how tech companies used to be. Maybe they're starting the downward make-money-at-all-costs spiral that has gripped the rest of tech.
How wonderful that even CEO Matthew Prince and COO Michelle Zatlyn can be replaced by AI. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow.
THEN I’ll be happy when management has rendered itself obsolete and becomes unemployed. Because the AI prompts used to replace the CEO and COO are trivial.
How wonderful that even CEO Matthew Prince and COO Michelle Zatlyn can be replaced by AI. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow.
THEN I’ll be happy when management has rendered itself obsolete and becomes unemployed. Because the AI prompts used to replace the CEO and COO are trivial.
I find it surprising that the word "incident" doesn't yet show up on this page. Cloudflare had at least two nasty incidents a few months ago. It certainly shook my confidence in the company's ability to run its infrastructure.
They want to polish upcoming employees into getting more used to AI tools usage but they don't want keep burning cash on experienced ones. They have to establish more YOY growth. Looks like everybody has to justify in the market why they need AI agents more than employees.
> Matthew has personally sent out every offer letter we've extended. It is a practice he has always looked forward to because it represented our growth and the incredible talent joining our mission
Who gives a shit if you treat your staff like this?
I will add cloudflare to the list of companies that I’ll never work for. Shame, because it seemed like an interesting place
The message to every Cloudflare employee is clear: you'll be there for the company when times are hard. But the company will not be there for you when times are hard.
It does not matter if the way we work has changed, or AI adoption has increased, or aliens show up. This is a demonstrated lack of loyalty that would result in immediate termination of the situation were reversed.
The important take away for everyone else is do you trust Matthew Prince to always take the high road and do what is right, combined with the fact that they man-in-the-middle all of your websites encrypted traffic? What happens when revenues are down and the shareholders demand blood again?
wish they would have just moved these people to technical support; cloudflares support is the worst i've ever experienced even under business/enterprise contracts (no replies ever in most cases)
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
So basically, there just were too many people using too many tokens LOL
"Enshitification" is not a new concept. A business should always be willing to make their product cheaper, even at the cost of quality, until the customers start turning away. Of course you need to be able to catch that moment early enough so that you don't lose too much market share to competition. But that will give you increased profits. The same with increasing prices.
On a side note, I'm curious as to how "600% increase in AI usage" is measured. Are their agentic workflows' bills skyrocketed 600% in the last 3 months? That would be in line with what other people using agents are seeing (costs are way higher than they expect/used to be). In that case, that would mean that LLM/agents are no longer necessarily cheaper than human labor, no?
Labor market data this week came out stronger than expected, even as large layoffs in IT continue to happen and IT job market continues to be very slow.
This seems kind of a critical point in time. I consider Cloudflare to be one of the more serious engineering organizations based on the quality of the products. Assuming they are not lying, them cutting 20% workforce citing AI signals there is actual teeth to this AI optimism.
On the other hand "only" 20% for the foreseeable feature is good news? It means there is ceiling to productivity that AI offers.
Or perhaps I am giving Matthew Prince too much credit here, and this is just an opportunistic cost cutting measure.
They make it quite clear that these layoffs are in response to adapting to using AI at the company:
> The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
The rest is hand-wringing about the emotional weight of the decision and what employees can expect from the process.
What remains to be seen is whether relying so heavily on AI will have similar outcomes to what we've seen from Microsoft and others. Which is to say, is now the time to stop using Cloudflare?
I’m finding this a little difficult to square. If things are radically changing within the company and they’re rearchitecting how the company works, wouldn’t they start with a transition period? Letting 1k people go, many of whom will be important parts of the organization, while simultaneously making radical changes in light of a radical rate of change over the last few months, seems very high risk.
Taking everything at face value, does anyone have thoughts on why this change makes sense now vs. in 6 months? Are they ripping the bandaid off or… due to the size of the org?
Interestingly NET is down 15%-ish in extended hours trading and was even down 20% at some point. Many times a stock will make a positive move when layoffs are announced.
Cloudflare is a growing company by most metrics so if efficiencies through AI were the reason for the layoffs they'd just take the boost and grow even faster.
It all doesn't check out and I think the real reason for the layoffs and the negative sentiment by the market on the news is that their revenue growth was not as fast as their expenses and they realized they overhired. Leadership doesn't want to dive too much into the red even if it would mean bigger growth down the line. They are now beholden to the near and mid term stock performance.
I've had the chance to talk to some SWEs working at Cloudflare off the record in recent months and the one concensus I heard was that there was many times some tension between the boots on the ground and the decisions from senior managment but of course nothing they could do and especially after this they'll make sure to be quiet should they remain. There seemed to be a lot of pressure to deliver features and new products but quality has been left behind which means the SWEs felt pressure to deliver while also having to deal with the ensuing issues to resolve.
Either way I wish everyone affected the best and a speedy job hunt - there'll be quite a few really good people on the market now for no fault of their own.
What the hell!? Cloudflare is absolutely killing it and now they're laying people off! I know some good people there with deep expertise and I hope they're not affected.
Cloudflare is transforming into yet another surveillance company.
I always see this "Cloudflare ensures you are not a bot"
soon may change to "Cloudflare ensures you have a digital ID"
They will not need so many people for this and there will not exist competition to bring better products when people are fired massively and are crippled by financial problems.
AI for me is an excuse. Not the main issue.
It is a strategic transformation to ensure dominant position by killing off competition. Afterall employees are always viewed as threat.
Cloudflare's stock price has been disconnected from reality for a while.. the only one that's wilder is Palantir which at least has revenue growth numbers that are very impressive.. meanwhile Cloudflare's enterprise value vs next 12 months revenue and revenue growth just don't justify this completely out of whack market valuation. I feel bad that the company has to try and sustainably justify that. It's incredible to watch the velocity of their launches. But I suppose the reality is most of them are just not selling
I am getting fucking sick and tired of a “service” that behaves so much like hostile malware and spyware that it gratuitously trips the protections I have added to my browsers and refuses to let me proceed.
Cloudflare is the CP of the Internet: almost no-one wants it, yet it persists like maggots eating the eyes of children.
> That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
20% of the workforce is currently being utilised for testing purposes by various companies. (just like we deploy Canary to 10% traffic for test)
In reality, approximately 5-10% of the workforce is equipped with AI technology and can now autonomously manage the entire company.
I am pretty sure CEOs can already see it! Companies create a great deal about the revenue per employee.
Downvoting my statement will not alter the situation, Claude and GPT-5.5 have the potential to replace most system administrators, DevOps engineers, copywriters, support personnel, and other roles.
I have observed this phenomenon in private product companies in India, where I serve as a consultant to multiple companies. I have noticed that 5-10% of the workforce is sufficient to ensure the continued performance of products, with reduced communication overhead, faster updates, and improved reliability.
I also have several side projects that encompass a wide range of responsibilities, so I am not merely a passive executive role.
In India, it has become increasingly challenging to secure jobs in the DevOps, system administration, and frontend domains.
In my opinion, a backend engineer’s job is the most difficult to replace at present, particularly if that engineer possesses a deep understanding of market and product dynamics.
Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
(reuters.com)1307 points by PriorityLeft 7 May 2026 | 946 comments
Comments
Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/]
Exhibit B - May 2026 - "Building for the future" - Cloudflare lays off 1100 people, about 20% of their workforce to "continue building the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/]
I'll finish on this quote: "The future ain't what it used to be." — Yogi Berra
The announcement reads as pretty heartless to me, but this is a very, very nice departure package
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
I’ll update this with a resume link tonight…
Assuming we take everything at face value for these sorts of cuts, it creates the following scenario:
A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI while also posting substantial profit or revenue growth. The company could downsize the workforce to capitalize on short-term efficiencies and increase margins, though this will come at the cost of long-term reputational harm due to posted profits/health as well as burning out staff who must do the same (or increasingly, more) work with less headcount, leading to attrition when the market shifts in their favor. Alternatively, it could leverage this surplus labor for a period of moonshot R&D or paying down technical/process debts while they have the capacity and the profit to pay for it, which harms short-term share price relative to their competitors slashing jobs, while improving the company's capabilities in the marketplace in the long-run, potentially through mastery of these AI tools or the creation of new product lines.
The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.
Vague overtones on AI savings without any hard evidence that’s happening, while ignoring obvious evidence that the company over-hired and is now underperforming relative to what would be needed to justify all that headcount.
Nobody believes these narratives at this point and CEOs would garner a lot more respect if they just simply said
“I screwed up, we hired too many people and fell short of performance targets. I own that. This resets us back on track.”
Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
obviously $2.5e9ish/yr is substantial in absolute terms ... but that's it? They intermediate half the internet and only capture $7m/day?
Their AI costs have increased 600% but this hasn't translated into actual revenue. Also they are probably projecting AI costs to keep growing. They've done the math and at some point it is going to affect their bottom line.
Reducing or limiting AI usage would be inconceivable given Cloudflare itself has invested on AI and is selling AI services. Instead they've opted for reducing about 20% of their head count.
The job market is already brutal for many candidates, especially people who aren’t social media personalities and don’t have names like Cloudflare, Meta, Amazon, or Google on their CVs. Some people will end up homeless...
At least having Cloudflare on their resume will likely help many of these people land new opportunities, so I wouldn’t be too worried about their long-term prospects...
What I don’t fully understand is why a company like Cloudflare decides to let experienced people go under the umbrella of “reorganisation.” Couldn’t some of them be given the opportunity to adapt to new priorities or ways of working?
What exactly is so fundamentally difficult in 2026 that someone with years of experience can’t learn?
Of course, large organisations sometimes develop dysfunctional habits. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the case here, but common examples include:
1. Problems that a motivated engineer could solve in minutes instead turn into meetings scheduled a week later, followed by more meetings.
2. People are becoming so process-oriented or conservative that they reject new approaches by default (Not even trying things out, and I don't mean migrating to a new fancy framework)
3. Engineers losing touch with product thinking and customer impact.
And if the explanation is cost-cutting, it’s fair to ask where companies choose to spend money elsewhere, e.g. unlimited LLM token usage with little accountability, extravagant off-sites, flying thousands of employees to expensive locations, etc.
Finally, why do they keep hundreds of job openings on their careers page? Are those false job descriptions wasting candidates' time?
It is ironic that Cloudflare is letting go 1100 of employees, while roughly 6-7 months ago, they were aiming to hire 1111 interns.
Article: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/upwork-ceo-hayden-brow...
https://www.bill.com/blog/a-message-to-bill-employees-may-20...
AI: "Building for the Future".
Executive: "Thank you! I knew it was the right decision".
Except for one small, very tiny, itsy-bitsy problem. We humans are very bad at understand the second and third order effects of events. Really, really bad. First order consequences: "Oh we don't need people anymore".
Do I know the second order effects? Probably not. But at least I know they will be there.
It wouldn't shock me if people formerly in tech have changed careers entirely, seemingly every tech-focused company is laying people off in favour of AI.
It's not that individuals are not useful, or even that their roles are not useful. It's that you have to structure your organization to be able to exploit a coming wave, and existing mechanisms and operations just get in the way. By the time Netflix shut down the DVD business it was making $80 m in revenue and the margins on that business were some 50%. But if you think the writing is on the wall, you're forced to act.
Doesn't mean the people in the DVD-mail-ops sides were bad at what they do. The world had just changed and the business became different.
I interviewed at cloudflare in ~2020 and didn’t get the job - everyone I met during the process seemed really smart and kind though. Would love to work with some of those people
Email me subject “cloudflare” if interested - thomas@ our domain (I am the cofounder)
https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2052560831909433554?s=20
It’s good stuff but there’s room for a lot of things
The buzzword everyone is looking for is "high-agency." (No, not those agents, but yes, those will help.) Basically employers want someone who will start something from scratch and take it to the finish line by themselves.
The interesting thing about this is, it is by definition not something you can put on your resume; It is something you show, not tell.
Yes, you need to do this even as you go through the absolute hell that is a job search. But trust me, this will a) help get a much better job, and b) help in the long run throughout and beyond your career. This will be the most valuable skill in the future.
You don’t need to use AI, but looking at the timeframes and skills in demand, yes, you very likely want to use AI.
A few other thoughts:
1. Target an area you are very familiar with. This will sharply cut down the time to MVP. This will be a challenge for the more junior folks, who should consider reaching out to senior mentors. Mentors, consider outsourcing a suitable personal project to them.
2. It could be something you are an expert on at work, if your employment contract and IP laws allow. As a bonus, releasing this as open source, or even a competing product if you’re so inclined, will have that intangible bonus of sticking it to your ex-employer.
3. Even if heavily using AI, keep your hands-on skill active. Most companies still do old-school leetcode interviews.
4. Bonus if you do something multi-disciplinary. Sprinkle in a domain you have no background in -- design, writing, sales, marketing, data science, frontend, whatever. You'll definitely need AI for this, and even when you make mistakes, few will harshly judge somebody down on their luck trying to expand their boundaries.
Hope this helps, and all the best!
0: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2052560831909433554
EDIT: Now it's off the main page, because of course it is.
Maybe it's supposed to mean that it's not... something more specific?
Happy to answer any questions, though I only check HN about once a day.
Anyone else stumbled over that part? That is not at all how I perceive CF.
But seeing the intern hiring count the year before basically offsetting the layoff headcount makes me think they've been planning to replace their employees with interns and plug the expertise gap with AI.
If you (or someone you know) were impacted and want to stay in the distributed systems or data plane space, we’re doing a lot of work at Kong ($2B valuation API & AI governance company) on high-performance proxies, control planes, and Rust, Golang, etc. (I used to work on Cloudflare's edge proxy project)
Happy to chat about the roles or just the tech stack in general if you want to geek out. Feel free to reach out: datong#konghq.com
Is this not admitting that they simply can't come up with any new ideas to invest in? That their intellectual capacity has topped out?
Profitable companies laying people off like this tells me they're done innovating and now it is time to milk the cash cows for all they're worth.
The stock is currently at -17% in after hours trading.
So you need to do something that's good for your margins to show investors.
1. Force every engineer to use agentic AI to the max.
2. Constant anxiety at work due to the threat of job loss and unreasonable expectations from management/business.
3. Engineers start yoloing everything using AI while wasting tokens.
4. Speed goes up in the short term, while quality and expertise degrade little by little, all while bleeding money due to AI usage.
5. One year down the line you have a company full of engineers that don't care and a bunch of slop-bloated, bug-ridden products that the customers don't want, and a massive bill.
Is this considered below expectations on wallstreet... enough to merit an 18% stock cut?
All this “AI bla bla efficiency bla bla agents bla bla” is a convenient excuse.
Hope everyone affected land on their feet.
If anything, AI makes each employee much more valuable because they can be much more productive and most big companies always have stuff that needs doing and opportunities for growth. So it's a sort of Jevons Paradox[1] situation but where human labour is the resource.
So basically, there were too many people burning too many tokens lol
I am disappointed by this decision from Cloudflare. I've always felt that massive layoffs are something that companies who are greedy and don't care about their employees do (like Amazon and Meta). Up until now, my impression of Cloudflare has been that they care about their societal impact to an extent and still share old values from how tech companies used to be. Maybe they're starting the downward make-money-at-all-costs spiral that has gripped the rest of tech.
THEN I’ll be happy when management has rendered itself obsolete and becomes unemployed. Because the AI prompts used to replace the CEO and COO are trivial.
So let’s hope for the day after tomorrow!
THEN I’ll be happy when management has rendered itself obsolete and becomes unemployed. Because the AI prompts used to replace the CEO and COO are trivial.
So let’s hope for the day after tomorrow.
Who gives a shit if you treat your staff like this?
I will add cloudflare to the list of companies that I’ll never work for. Shame, because it seemed like an interesting place
It does not matter if the way we work has changed, or AI adoption has increased, or aliens show up. This is a demonstrated lack of loyalty that would result in immediate termination of the situation were reversed.
The important take away for everyone else is do you trust Matthew Prince to always take the high road and do what is right, combined with the fact that they man-in-the-middle all of your websites encrypted traffic? What happens when revenues are down and the shareholders demand blood again?
So did your outages...
is this really the future we want to build?
So basically, there just were too many people using too many tokens LOL
On a side note, I'm curious as to how "600% increase in AI usage" is measured. Are their agentic workflows' bills skyrocketed 600% in the last 3 months? That would be in line with what other people using agents are seeing (costs are way higher than they expect/used to be). In that case, that would mean that LLM/agents are no longer necessarily cheaper than human labor, no?
Labor market data this week came out stronger than expected, even as large layoffs in IT continue to happen and IT job market continues to be very slow.
On the other hand "only" 20% for the foreseeable feature is good news? It means there is ceiling to productivity that AI offers.
Or perhaps I am giving Matthew Prince too much credit here, and this is just an opportunistic cost cutting measure.
> The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
The rest is hand-wringing about the emotional weight of the decision and what employees can expect from the process.
What remains to be seen is whether relying so heavily on AI will have similar outcomes to what we've seen from Microsoft and others. Which is to say, is now the time to stop using Cloudflare?
Companies are starting to realize they have a very captive consumer base. The consumers can't just move. They're collecting money.
It'll take a LONG time for a new competitor to pop up, for them to build out and start to steal customers.
Equally the cost for customers themselves to move is very high.
So in the meantime these large companies realize that by slowing down development they're not actually losing anything.
What they'll do instead is double down and start another 100 useless AI initiatives that no one wants.
Taking everything at face value, does anyone have thoughts on why this change makes sense now vs. in 6 months? Are they ripping the bandaid off or… due to the size of the org?
TLDR:
free users make Cloudflare’s network smarter
free users create massive scale
some free users eventually become enterprise customers
and the huge traffic volume lowers Cloudflare’s own infrastructure costs.
For example, you probably don't need the extra finance person from the start-up you brought on.
Cloudflare is a growing company by most metrics so if efficiencies through AI were the reason for the layoffs they'd just take the boost and grow even faster.
It all doesn't check out and I think the real reason for the layoffs and the negative sentiment by the market on the news is that their revenue growth was not as fast as their expenses and they realized they overhired. Leadership doesn't want to dive too much into the red even if it would mean bigger growth down the line. They are now beholden to the near and mid term stock performance.
I've had the chance to talk to some SWEs working at Cloudflare off the record in recent months and the one concensus I heard was that there was many times some tension between the boots on the ground and the decisions from senior managment but of course nothing they could do and especially after this they'll make sure to be quiet should they remain. There seemed to be a lot of pressure to deliver features and new products but quality has been left behind which means the SWEs felt pressure to deliver while also having to deal with the ensuing issues to resolve.
Either way I wish everyone affected the best and a speedy job hunt - there'll be quite a few really good people on the market now for no fault of their own.
It is not that AI is the contributing factor.
Cloudflare is transforming into yet another surveillance company.
I always see this "Cloudflare ensures you are not a bot" soon may change to "Cloudflare ensures you have a digital ID"
They will not need so many people for this and there will not exist competition to bring better products when people are fired massively and are crippled by financial problems.
AI for me is an excuse. Not the main issue.
It is a strategic transformation to ensure dominant position by killing off competition. Afterall employees are always viewed as threat.
"lol jk it will totally replace you, bye"
Also just once, I wish one of these CEOs would give themselves a slap on the wrist and take a pay cut
I am getting fucking sick and tired of a “service” that behaves so much like hostile malware and spyware that it gratuitously trips the protections I have added to my browsers and refuses to let me proceed.
Cloudflare is the CP of the Internet: almost no-one wants it, yet it persists like maggots eating the eyes of children.
What a load of crap..
It seems only costs increased. If productivity had increased along with the AI costs they wouldn't need to layoff.
Of couse, this is all bullshit. Making a vague gesture at AI makes it sound like the layoffs are positive.
Truth is this is simply cost cutting. Either due to overhiring in the past, or bracing for the likely economic downturn.
In reality, approximately 5-10% of the workforce is equipped with AI technology and can now autonomously manage the entire company.
I am pretty sure CEOs can already see it! Companies create a great deal about the revenue per employee.
Downvoting my statement will not alter the situation, Claude and GPT-5.5 have the potential to replace most system administrators, DevOps engineers, copywriters, support personnel, and other roles.
I have observed this phenomenon in private product companies in India, where I serve as a consultant to multiple companies. I have noticed that 5-10% of the workforce is sufficient to ensure the continued performance of products, with reduced communication overhead, faster updates, and improved reliability.
I also have several side projects that encompass a wide range of responsibilities, so I am not merely a passive executive role.
In India, it has become increasingly challenging to secure jobs in the DevOps, system administration, and frontend domains.
In my opinion, a backend engineer’s job is the most difficult to replace at present, particularly if that engineer possesses a deep understanding of market and product dynamics.