alt Hacker NewsCloudflare to cut about 20% workforce
Comments
Wow, can't say I saw this one coming. Cloudflare has been putting out a lot of strong work lately. What percentage of their workforce is this?
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.
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.
Oof. I guess cloudflare is also gonna have an uptime monitor like Claude now.
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.
Sure, but at least agents can now buy domains!
Why does "the future" in corporate announcements always mean layoffs?
first slowly, then all at once.
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?
Surprised that this isn't part of a "journey"…
Getting laid off in this job market is absolutely terrifying.
Hope everyone affected land on their feet.
Can the disgruntled ex-employees contribute to the Puppeteer Stealth plugin? ;)
Discussion thread on /r/Cloudflare: https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/s/47qJtr2yEx
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.
> Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone.
So did your outages...
titling "Building for the Future" the announcement of a mass lay-off is disgusting and makes me sick to be honest
is this really the future we want to build?
The day I switched to cloudflare for my domains... one of the best days in my life.
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.
well at least they're getting some decent severance, still sucks, especially in this market.
They should have fired 11 people more and match their public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1
you can earn and spent but you'll never get enough here too i live in msk, russia and working full time job and yes,married have children
My 100% completely personal opinion.
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.
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?
"AI will not replace you, it will just supercharge your existing capabilities."
"lol jk it will totally replace you, bye"
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.
I would think cloudflare would benefit from all the vibe-coded apps as it is an easy target to deploy these on.
Shameless title.
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?
I suspect that companies anticipate that AI prices are going to go way, way up, and they're going all-in on the current "cheap" credits before then.
Did they find the vibecoding secret sauce?
I interviewed there over a month ago and they ghosted me after 3 good rounds. I dodged a bullet it seems.
Saving Cost for the Future.
Is the job market bad?
Why is Matthew Prince not fired? They missed EPS and AI could write (or perhaps did write) this entirely meaningless announcement.
What they'll do instead is double down and start another 100 useless AI initiatives that no one wants.
A message devoid of any meaning. Like wtf does agentic era prep mean? Is their AI spend too high? Are they not profitable?
Also just once, I wish one of these CEOs would give themselves a slap on the wrist and take a pay cut
They also reported Q1 revenue up 34% YoY. https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...
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
Didn’t they just recently say they were hiring a huge number of interns because of AI?
I'm not sure why they think I have the time to read all of that.
I've been slowly moving all of my stuff over to Cloudflare. This certainly does not inspire confidence to continue down that path.