alt Hacker NewsCloudflare to cut about 20% workforce
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> 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.
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’ll update this with a resume link tonight…
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.
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.
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.
> Cloudflare expects second-quarter revenue of $664 million to $665 million,
obviously $2.5e9ish/yr is substantial in absolute terms ... but that's it? They intermediate half the internet and only capture $7m/day?
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.
Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
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
If you were impacted Magnetic (AI Tax Prep for CPA firms) is hiring senior - staff level engineers in SF https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic
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)
"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.
> The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms.
Anyone else stumbled over that part? That is not at all how I perceive CF.
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!
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.
My read of this:
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.
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%)
People who lived through 2001 and 2008 crashes, did it look like this or was it even worse than what's happening these days with so many layoffs?
Yikes, this sucks.
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/
"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.
Executive: "Give me a title for the blog post where I'm laying off a bunch of people".
AI: "Building for the Future".
Executive: "Thank you! I knew it was the right decision".
Building for the future is great!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bill and Upwork also have announced layoffs today.
https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/upwork-ceo-hayden-brow...
https://www.bill.com/blog/a-message-to-bill-employees-may-20...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's interesting to me that this is lower on the HN page than the Cloudflare post talking about the CVE handling even though the scoring is higher.
EDIT: Now it's off the main page, because of course it is.
Prince is claiming they laid off very few SWEs, I know at least an entire team of SWEs.
When you announce 639m USD revenue for q1 Then lay off a thousand people because you love the smell of your ai farts.
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
> 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
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?
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
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.
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.
Sure, but at least agents can now buy domains!
first slowly, then all at once.
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?
Oof. I guess cloudflare is also gonna have an uptime monitor like Claude now.
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?
Some of this is probably from all the companies they've acquihired, rather than genuine AI improvements.
For example, you probably don't need the extra finance person from the start-up you brought on.
This is awkward.
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