The hollowing out of another iconic American brand begins.
Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#182This 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 quo…
The skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.
Honestly not a bad theory. There’s definitely a huge disparity between actual productivity gained by using agentic coding done somewhat properly… and a non-stop wave of vibe coded work causing outages and churn. Pre-Covid hiring coupled with the high enterprise pricing for AI plans, it would make sense.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're laying off the people who can't produce a minimum of 2x with AI, and keeping the maximalists with no life outside of work barely keeping up with the 100k LOC a week they're shipping to prod. Suits have an idea of what the New Model Coder should be, and it's not people who don't burn through 100,000,000 tokens a week.
That makes no sense. If that were really true then they could’ve saved a bundle and did that same thing years ago before AI.
I mean, they do (and did). If you aren't shipping, you'll be out eventually.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#184It 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%)
Whatever the play here they can’t be angling for any external PR or internal morale boost. What if they wrote: “This is a tough economy and we have to tighten our belts.” Maybe that’s naive of me. Bad signal to investors as opposed to insignificant employees and commoners (PR)? But contrast with this: > The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We ar…
Wonder if they used AI to write it. "We don't just [x]. We [y]" strikes again.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#185The 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.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#186Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#187They also reported Q1 revenue up 34% YoY. https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#188My 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.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#189This 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 quo…
About as awkward as "Q1 revenue up 34% YoY". https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43#a260507p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#190Companies 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.