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Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
- jesse_dot_id 5mo agoI've been slowly moving all of my stuff over to Cloudflare. This certainly does not inspire confidence to continue down that path.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- solomaker282 5mo ago[dead]
- rohitpaulk 5mo agoThat'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?
- tardedmeme 5mo agoEmployees cost money. The ZIRP free-money era has ended. Companies have been laying off tech people for the last few years. Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.
- sssilver 5mo agoYou couldn't tell this by looking at the stock market.
- XorNot 5mo agoWhich is the point. There's been a concerted effort by the government to make this the story. Layoffs and cost of living problems but you must discount the evidence of your eyes and ears and remember it's over 50,000! The PE ratio of Tesla should tell you everything you need to know about the stock market representing actual economic conditions.
- jazzyjackson 5mo agoTo me, it just means a dollar doesn't buy as much of IBM as it used to.
- citrin_ru 5mo agoStock market is up only because investors bet on AI, if you'll exclude AI and AI supply chain at best it would be stagnant.
- blingbot9 5mo agoWhenever someone brings up ZIRP, especially someone with a username like yours, it's an indicator that they have no clue what they are talking about and like to regurgitate things they read on the internet. > Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance. Right...wait, what?
- lijok 5mo agoZirp ended over 4 years ago, what are you talking about, the us economy is collapsing? What? Care to elaborate on any of this?
- sjZqahg 5mo agoCoinbase for sure is driven by declining Bitcoin fundamentals and entry of other big players in the Trump inner circle. The AI narrative is a lie. Cloudflare was overvalued and missed extreme expectations (down another 12% now). By this time I wonder which investor still believes the AI excuse.
- stego-tech 5mo agoThere's multiple simultaneous narratives: the industry-wide one of slashing well-paid tech talent under the guise of AI productivity boosts, and what's actually going in at each company. Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not hemorrhaging cash per se (their cash reserves alone could cover ~9 more years of losses), but still enough to warrant some cutbacks - and AI is the current scapegoat, thus they finger AI and throw folks out the door. Coinbase's story is different: they're making good money, but their industry is inherently volatile. Again, recent volatility in the crypto markets related to...things...is dragging down long-term prospects for currencies, while ongoing trades are broadly just insiders doing insider things or exiting their positions for liquidity. Still, their share price is down 27% over 5 years and 18% YTD, so they also need to pump their share price so the executives get paid; layoffs are consistently rewarded by the shareholders, thus they axe part of their workforce for the bump and fingerpoint to AI. Never take what a company says at face value, and always check their balance sheets. What Cloudflare did sucks but could be warranted to some degree; what Coinbase did has no justification whatsoever beyond naked greed.
- 13a07e686ca5 5mo ago[dead]
- j2jj 5mo agoIts quite filthy but it benefits them all to lay off lots of people to reset the wage rate in the market... Im sure we will see a wave of re-hiring when this stuff starts to blow over but many initially will be at a much lower wage rate.
- BirdieNZ 5mo ago> Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Their free cashflow is high; they're choosing not to report a profit. I don't think it's useful/accurate to say they don't make money. Don't get me wrong, they may be doing a layoff to boost margins or enter GAAP profitability but the company revenue exceeds its operating cost by quite a bit. See in their latest quarterly report: https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2026/Cloudflare-Announces-First-Quarter-2026-Financial-Results/default.aspx https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2026/Cloudflare-Ann... > First quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million, representing an increase of 34% year-over-year So they're growing 34% annually. > Free cash flow was $84.1 million, or 13% of revenue, compared to $52.9 million, or 11% of revenue, in the first quarter of 2025. Cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities were $4,163.9 million as of March 31, 2026. ...and they have $84 million free cash flow in one quarter, and it's consistently pretty good cashflow. And they have $4b of cash or cash equivalents stockpiled. It seems pretty healthy to me.
- saos 5mo agoIs Coinbase that major though? they're always doing lay-offs.
- strange_quark 5mo agoI think there's also a certain permission structure that once one sufficiently large org does a big round of layoffs and doesn't get punished, a bunch of others will run the same playbook. We've seen this before -- back in 2022 when Elon fired like half or more of Twitter and the service didn't immediately implode, it gave other CEOs permission to do massive layoffs in the guise of "efficiency" even though the real reason was ZIRP was over. Now they're claiming it's because of AI when it's really that their margins are eroding because the overall economy is slumping and they need to offset AI spend.
- wrqvrwvq 5mo ago[dead]
- brazukadev 5mo agoMeta's layoff was also last week, much bigger than both.
- throwatdem12311 5mo agoAI productivity is a lie. It’s AI spending because the revenue hasn’t gone up.
- Overpower0416 5mo agoCoinbase lost 40% transaction revenue. The AI thing is just smokescreen https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/coinbase-shares-slide-crypto-giant-212436404.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACpqiWFsWU1KpBypvrlc6mKPhf7y9_UdK9Z1M3S1C2TVy16z7EXg3TbvJGOUjxF_CmYtXO4Dc82qyAYUd4HDht2HIH_6H0agCEhrW_F6JnMFTWKqULwPfngafrQH_ahuYt1n6Xh9A8ccrbyjYu2GvAWhgp4p6OWW19StSD9EqITG https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/coinbase-s...
- punkbit 5mo agoIt seems that Bill.com and UpWork, too!
- deanputney 5mo agoWow, 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?
- age123456gpg 5mo ago20%
- badc0ffee 5mo agoThat's massive
- piperswe 5mo agoWelp, 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…
- stego-tech 5mo agoThat sucks, and the market is too bleak for empty platitudes. This just sucks, period. Take care of yourself until you land something. I'll keep this in mind if anything comes through my grapevine.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- rishabhaiover 5mo agoGood luck, I'm sure you will find a great role!
- mrbonner 5mo agogood luck and take care of yourself!
- piperswe 5mo agoCV link: https://piperswe.me/cv.pdf https://piperswe.me/cv.pdf
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agoFirstly, kind sir, layoffs are hard for each and everyone of us and I wish you best as you navigate it. I know you will get many wishes and good lucks though but consider my wishes to be one of many to help ya out. The who wants to be hired page is still open within Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975570 I recommend if you can share your CV/send a message there, I will try to also keep an eye on it if you do share your CV/resume there and I would love to upvote your comment there to shower some more exposure/love from the community as you are member of hackernews. You are also part of the hackernews community and its the least that I/we can do. :hug:
- pcdevils 5mo agoWhen you announce 639m USD revenue for q1 Then lay off a thousand people because you love the smell of your ai farts.
- nine_k 5mo agoRevenue != profit.
- nlitened 5mo agoThousand people cost 60m USD of quarterly _profit_ though (not even revenue)
- trollied 5mo agoThat’s not how accounting works.
- tick_tock_tick 5mo agoAre you trolling or just trying to avoid saying they didn't make any money and actually lost over $20 million?
- pcdevils 5mo agoFlippant sarcasm that they're pretending this wasn't a financial decision, and was entirely about being ready for the amazing productivity gains of ai they've already seen, expanding across the business.
- cortesoft 5mo agoYes, their revenue was $639m but their expenses were $702m. It doesn't matter how much revenue you have if you are spending more than that.
- _t2kx 5mo agoExpenses were more on purpose, they amortized a bunch of hardware depreciation now instead of over 5-7 years with the new tax changes. This is pure greed
- prymitive 5mo agoObviously AI is just a excuse
- prymitive 5mo agoIt’s not like this is a factory floor where you process something coming in and AI suddenly makes the process more efficient and people are idle. Every team in tech world has infinite backlog, you don’t fire 20% the minute someone manages to close a few tickets.
- benmusch 5mo agowhy not? isn't the implication of your point that companies should just hire infinitely so long as there's work to be done?
- ok_dad 5mo agoCompanies never want to reduce productivity unless they need to cut spending or increase profits. In other words, if AI increases productivity that’s a direct win they can use to beat their competitors. You can’t spend money you don’t have, but you want to spend the money you do have as point at there work to do, which there always is.
- benmusch 5mo ago> unless they need to cut spending or increase profits yes, so basically always? the situations where companies don't want to do this are very rare. I understand your broader point that doubling down on productive things is useful. But there's no limiting principle to that idea. The obvious reality is that businesses are trying to find a sweet spot between expenses and productivity. It's not always the case that slashing spending is worth it. But it's equally naive to act like being able to do more with less shouldn't make you want... less
- Marsymars 5mo ago> Every team in tech world has infinite backlog I have non-tech friends who struggle to understand this, because they literally clear their entire backlog of work every single day they're at work.
- peelpod 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- alyxya 5mo agoI 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.
- JustSkyfall 5mo agoIt's interesting how every time there's a layoff, the blog post always has a title like "Preparing for what's next" or "An update on our workforce" or "Getting ready for the agentic era"!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 5mo agoThey should make it “Good news, everyone” like in Futurama.
- doggo_mate 5mo agoWelcome to the corporate world
- keybored 5mo agoTwo days ago: “Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%” (layoffs) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021368
- rvz 5mo agoThis is what the true definition of "AGI" is.
- kristianp 5mo agoThe title should be something like "Cloudflare reducing workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally".
- dang 5mo ago
- everfrustrated 5mo agoCutting 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.
- ttul 5mo agoI know this is cold comfort, but in times like this, it can be a good idea to start your own company. Cloudflare itself was founded in the wake of the GFC (post-2008), when tech was dead as a doornail. The best time to start something is when awesome people to work with are unemployed.
- fuddle 5mo agoIt 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%)
- louiereederson 5mo agoYikes, so incremental margins are in the 50s. I think this says it all.
- keybored 5mo agoWhatever 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 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. What is this even saying? We use a lot of AI. And not just for other people... for ourselves. This means that: we need to be intentional? What is a regular, not-investor, person supposed to glean from this? We’ve hit the automation jackpot: some of you will be fired, some of you will get more work for the same pay?[1] Along with shoving your face with euphoric buzzwords “AI era”, “supercharge the value”. I must surmise that whatever PR and internal morale blow (?) matters so little to them. They are not at all afraid of any backlash from any lowly people. [1] Again. This paragraph isn’t saying anything beyond that they are using AI and ho-ho things are a-changing. So one has to guess.
- FeteCommuniste 5mo agoWonder if they used AI to write it. "We don't just [x]. We [y]" strikes again.
- ggoo 5mo ago> 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
- doggo_mate 5mo agoIn Europe they’re pretty much obligated to provide this package
- everfrustrated 5mo agoComplete fiction. Over covid it was common in big tech layoffs to get much less severance in Europe than US.
- flumpcakes 5mo agoDefinitely not true in the UK. This is extremely rare for it's generosity. I've never seen anything like this in the UK.
- tick_tock_tick 5mo agoAs a general rule USA Tech is much nicer to their employees both when working and during a layoff then Europe.
- nasso_dev 5mo agotitling "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?
- zb3 5mo agoThe future, for those who have the capital. The rest may die, shareholders don't care.
- keybored 5mo agoThen we must build our own future. One where we deny the capitalists access to their own automated killer robot armies.
- konart 5mo ago>Then we must build our own future. Sure. How many of those hated capitalists have started with exactly same thought? People should stop drop this naive act.
- keybored 5mo agoI don’t think I’m the naive one if you think those “hated capitalists” had the intention of building a bright future for the collective us.
- konart 5mo ago> if you think ... had the intention of building a bright future for the collective us. Never said or implied such thing.
- keybored 5mo agoYou shot off a one-sentence rejoinder about capitalists building a future. What does it mean? Not worth your time to explain, but worth your time to nuh-huh about your autor intent after the fact.
- throwaway613746 5mo ago[dead]
- adhamsalama 5mo ago> Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. So did your outages...
- fch42 5mo agoThese relative figures mean nothing. Your usage of one specific ultra-new model went from one hour a month to seven? congrats to the 600% increase. Your use of a widespread common model went from 1M tokens to 7M tokens ? Also a 600% increase. Your spend on AI from 1M/month to 84M/year ? ditto. Other than the latter, I'd read all this as meaningless. Am I wrong?
- deepriverfish 5mo agowell at least they're getting some decent severance, still sucks, especially in this market.
- opentokix 5mo ago"I have decided to sacrifice some of you for shareholder value, but that is something I am willing to do"
- jwpapi 5mo agohttps://polymarket.com/event/another-critical-cloudflare-incident-by-995 https://polymarket.com/event/another-critical-cloudflare-inc...
- stego-tech 5mo agoI'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.
- louiereederson 5mo agoI think as someone pointed out earlier, this is more likely about margin preservation as their gross margins are deteriorating really quickly.
- stego-tech 5mo agoYeah, I wrote this before I dove into their balance sheets for another comment. Cloudflare’s cuts are more defensible than most, but the timing and explanation are shady given that they’ve had the same problems for years.
- shimman 5mo agoTurns out running a profitable business is really hard when all you've known was ZIRP. Honestly think the business lessons from big tech over the last 20 years are hogwash, mostly due to them abusing their monopolies allowing them to subsidize failing BUs indefinitely. 37signals has a better approach to starting software companies, and many of their peers/near peers indicate that it's a better way to sustain lifestyle companies too. Doesn't turn you into a billionaire tho, maybe that's a plus.
- davidcelis 5mo agoI 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
- SebRollen 5mo agoKind of makes me wonder if the "more than 1,100 employees globally" actually means "1,111" employees. Talk about committing to the bit
- apitman 5mo agoAll 4 bits
- farfatched 5mo agoWhat is an intern in this context? When I hear "intern" I think of a summer internship. Are there other types for software developers?
- OJFord 5mo agoNot meaningfully, but sometimes 6mo-1y as part of an undergraduate programme to gain industry experience. E.g. I had 6mo in my third year (not at Cloudflare).
- sjZqahg 5mo agoWhy 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.
- 13a07e686ca5 5mo ago[dead]
- faangguyindia 5mo agoSomeone who knows the product deeply and has grown it into what it is today will always stay valuable. AI can replace people at a low level because they are seen as a cost. While people at the top are better connected. CEOs travel a lot, probably subscribing to 100 mastermind groups where CEOs of other companies also hang out, playing dozens of mind games and strategising all the time. Such people are hard to replace. The average employee's role is finite, and they aren't taking much risk; therefore, it's trivial to get rid of them.
- ric2b 5mo agoI was with you until the talk about risk. Low level employees are always taking far bigger risks in relative terms, the worse position a CEO will be in if all of his "risk" hits him is that they'll have to become a regular low level employee.
- jakubadamw 5mo agoI believe the commenter above meant risk to the company, not the employee.
- treexs 5mo agoWith 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.
- RSHEPP 5mo agoAny 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.
- llama052 5mo agoYeah I'm there with you. I got lucky as a kid with delving into this as a hobby and it turned into a professional career. Thought we could change the world for the better, what we made instead was social media cancer and LLMs that can pretend to make everyone 10x more productive. I loathe it.
- ChrisLTD 5mo agoAs long as it's pretend productivity, things should settle in a decent place. How long that takes, who knows.
- fzeroracer 5mo agoI've been out of work since almost a year ago after getting laid off and the same is true for a lot of my coworkers; the job market is absolutely broken in half for a lot of different but related reasons. Thankfully I have significant savings and low costs so I can just coast and do stuff in my own time, but the same hasn't been true for others I know. Frankly I fully expect people to get even angrier once they become unable to meet the bills and companies still tout the whole AI line.
- crackinmalackin 5mo agoAbsolutely. News like this is so hard to ignore. Nervous as hell to drop big money on things the family needs right now. Grateful to have a job, but life overall was just better in almost every sense before AI became part of our daily vocabulary and layoffs occurring every couple of weeks.
- daemonologist 5mo ago
- zb3 5mo ago> 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. What a load of crap..
- sikozu 5mo agoLetting 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.
- everfrustrated 5mo agoThere 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 https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
- harel 5mo agoThis is no that far fetched... I don't think it's that common that a customer sits on the fence and says "If only company X had Y on their feature list I'll be a paying customer". So the speed at which the company now runs through its roadmap does not equate to new customers joining.
- szmarczak 5mo agoI wouldn't argue that it doesn't give any benefits. However, it's not worth the current cost unless you already own RTX PRO 6000 to run any reasonable LLM. I'm using Claude Free and I'm happy with what I get, especially for the cost of $0. I'm eagerly waiting for the prices to come down so I can upgrade my PC to AM5 and run Gemma 4.
- j2jj 5mo agoIts quite possible that LLMs become housed units like the next PC. Initially it starts off as being a large thing in data centers (like computers did) until they got smaller and smaller. Except I expect the time it takes to get smaller and smaller to compress much more - given that we live in a world with far more resources and risk-taking.
- thrance 5mo agoPersonally, I think AI is just a convenient scapegoat for these mass layoffs. Also, these kinds of announcements contribute to sustaining the AI hype which all tech investors benefit from. And investors looove hearing about mass layoffs, stock goes up every time without fail.
- mike_d 5mo agoThe 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?
- IshKebab 5mo agoYou only have to be there for the company in that you do work for them and they give you money in return. Any tech guys working for them will have received plenty of money. I feel sorry for the non-tech people though (HR, recruiters, etc.). This announcement is bullshit though. Banging on about transparency and then not even trying to give a reason. They didn't even try to say it's because of AI! They just say "AI is important. We're laying off 1000 people." Wtf.
- driverdan 5mo agoThis is literally every public company you just described. Companies do not have loyalty to their employees.
- gcr 5mo agoDiscussion thread on /r/Cloudflare: https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/s/47qJtr2yEx https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/s/47qJtr2yEx
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mayurpipaliya 5mo agoYikes, 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/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/
- aniruddh__s 5mo agoThey're still keeping the interns. Feels very much like a 'replacement'.
- carefulfungi 5mo agoAm I math-ing right that this creates a 1:4 employee to intern ratio? (5000 x 20% layoffs = 1000 redundancies; 4000 employees and 1000 interns?)
- aniruddh__s 5mo agoThe 1111 interns are spread throughout the year, so this summer there will be about 500 interns among 4000 employees.
- saos 5mo agoThats a solid package tbh
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoYes I am jealous. I'm on unemployment paying out of pocket for health insurance and my unvested stocks disappeared.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- oytis 5mo agoWhy does "the future" in corporate announcements always mean layoffs?
- rvz 5mo agoCloudflare has achieved "AGI" internally.
- ascorbic 5mo agohttps://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
- headinthesky 5mo agoThis 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.
- tootie 5mo agoIn my experience, companies never value transparency. And it's doubly true for companies that boast about transparency. Obviously, it's within their authority to cut head count, but they've also obviously made some kind of major strategic shift either to cut costs or abandon some lines of business and they are not being upfront about it at all. The stock is up 111% over 12 months. They don't seem to be in any danger of crashing or collapsing.
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- brandon272 5mo ago> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run. As a Cloudflare customer, that's reassuring! .. not.
- headinthesky 5mo agoI know of 4 teams in Cloudflare One, who lost EMs, PMs and engineers in really critical connectivity systems. Our list of things we need to do is years long. Many of those are needed for reliability and scaling. They quietly stopped hiring months ago and I figured things were not good. My mistake was thinking my group would be a little safer being profit drivers and big deals...
- Snoozle 5mo ago"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.
- lijok 5mo agoWhich part of that sentence was confusing? I found it perfectly clear. Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal. Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.
- SahAssar 5mo ago> Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal. I don't see anywhere where the jump from "structuring for AI" directly leads to "laying people off", unless "structuring for AI" means there is less work for people to do, do you?
- runnr_az 5mo agoI think it means - we're spending more money on AI thus we don't have as much to spend on people
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Snoozle 5mo ago"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.
- headinthesky 5mo agoThe bottleneck is never code
- smileson2 5mo agoWorst 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
- surgical_fire 5mo ago> Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. 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.
- faangguyindia 5mo ago>It seems only costs increased. If productivity had increased along with the AI costs they wouldn't need to layoff. Thing is average employee skill level is low. And entirely replaced by something like GPT 5.5 People have egos and people have "phases" in life. A 10x person isn't productive for all years of their life. They've periods of high performance, periods of low performance, depression, etc. Above all, communication overhead is the biggest bottleneck in product development and information withholding and asymmetry. This makes AI far better because it can simply write all its findings to a file, which you can revisit later.
- throaway234221 5mo ago[flagged]
- faangguyindia 5mo agoSo you suggest they give out free money to people they don't need? If you believe it negatively impacts Cloudflare, feel free to start a competing company and hire all those; it's free market after all, anyone can raise money if you can show there is any point in your vision. What's funny is software guys have forever automated jobs of others. Remember? Automating e-commerce logistics? Automating taxis? Automating vacuuming of floor? But when their own job is in danger, "think of employees" comes into consideration?
- rvz 5mo agoCorrect. The laid off staff can now build a startup with the skills they have learned at Cloudflare and compete. AI exists now and there are no more excuses for them.
- funnyduck123 5mo agoit heard like AIC album 1995, hey now i'm chatting here from Moscow.. Jesus save our world! we're tide of politics and 21 centures. slow down smoke more stuff
- 5ahsgf 5mo agoFeel free to start an Indian company. But you don't do that. You come to the West like Nadella and Pichai and take away the jobs in Western companies, genius. And in the case of Nadella, ruin said companies.
- faangguyindia 5mo agoYou did same with native americans and do you remember East India company?
- fontain 5mo agoI’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?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dleslie 5mo agoThey 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?
- hn_burner_25 5mo agoClearly 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.
- jgalt212 5mo agoI don't think productivity boosters lead to net hiring or firing, but I do think they lead to higher wages.
- llama052 5mo agoIt'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.
- phpnode 5mo agoit's about the comments / votes ratio.
- CWwdcdk7h 5mo agoTo be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that.
- swyx 5mo agowhy exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate
- dang 5mo agoBecause it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage. Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead? * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- swyx 5mo agoright but feel like comment count is a poor proxy for flamewar in an age where cheap intelligence to semantically classify discussions is available, so that, as affected me in the past, an author of a post simply enthusiastically engaging with every reply is not punished. maybe to put it in a way where your values are aligned, i'm a curious person, and i learn a lot from the discussions that happen right on HN rather that only going to the source.. indiscriminate comment count damping takes away/lowers visibility of the most interesting comments that would provoke my curiosity. one could instead do any sort of basic classifier system ranging from bag of words to running a ModernBERT to rate flamewarness and differentially apply the downrank based on "flamewar score" rather than "really poor proxy to flamewar score"
- carlos-menezes 5mo agoGetting laid off in this job market is absolutely terrifying. Hope everyone affected land on their feet.
- pier25 5mo agoMy 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.
- rishabhaiover 5mo agoI don't think so. I think this is a common narrative in Hackernews when layoff news are shared. All the people I talk to in the industry positively confirm a boost in productivity. Its contribution to actual revenue could lag but it is present and confirmed by many.
- trashface 5mo agoIt has boosted my productivity in my side projects but its nothing I can monetize. Maybe companies have the same problem.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoWhich public companies that do NOT sell AI have posted that AI has boosted their revenue?
- bamboozled 5mo agoI feel new startups, features and more services coming online would be a good measurement of this amazing productivity boost we're seeing. Have you noticed a major improvement in every service you pay for ? Like many new features and incredible improvements in user experience and reliability? Because I’ve not really noticed that. Actually, things seem to be offline more than they used to, namely GitHub. I am definitely more productive at generating lines of code though which definitely gives me the illusion things are mOvInG rEaLly FaSt.
- minimaltom 5mo agoNah, even insane token costs don't come close to the costs of labor. Most likely this is just 'AI-washing' - dressing a layoff for economic reasons (such as propping up their shrinking margins) as something more palatable to investors (AI).
- 762236 5mo agoI'm not sure why they think I have the time to read all of that.
- dullcrisp 5mo agoWho are you?
- SilverElfin 5mo agoDidn’t they just recently say they were hiring a huge number of interns because of AI?
- curioustore 5mo agoThe interns are training their replacements. Efficient.
- outlore 5mo agoA 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
- AloysB 5mo agoThis 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/ 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/ 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
- cyanydeez 5mo agoThe skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.
- ihsw 5mo agoIt is May 2026, there is no difference between AI and non-AI bills. Most (if not all) major enterprises in the US have gone through at least one round of org-wide subscription renewals (eg: Atlassian product packs, Microsoft product packs, etc) where 1) price increases were mandatory, 2) AI features could not be opted out of, and 3) AI feature usage was strongly encouraged from C-suite to client-facing biz staff to telephone agent support staff. I repeat, we are passed the point where AI bills and non-AI bills can be differentiated. We are all paying for these features driven by tokens whether we like it or not, whether the cost-benefit analysis makes sense, and whether they are even being used. And we are all passing the costs onto everyone lower on the totem pole, from insurance groups to bank groups to national grocery chains to consultant conglomerates to minimum wage front-line staff to below-minimum-wage gig workers. And this is why there are layoffs, every price increase from the top down causes further price increases to cascade down.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoThe reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.
- deleted 5mo ago
- 01284a7e 5mo agoScrew 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.
- pm90 5mo agoTheir hiring process is remarkably bad for a company that otherwise is so well run. My most recent experience was them throwing a workday link at me to fill something out before we even had the initial phone screen and the forms/ui was so poorly designed that I stopped responding to them.
- pier25 5mo agoBill and Upwork also have announced layoffs today. https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/upwork-ceo-hayden-brown-shared-the-following-message-with-employees-on-may-7-2026 https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/upwork-ceo-hayden-brow... https://www.bill.com/blog/a-message-to-bill-employees-may-2026 https://www.bill.com/blog/a-message-to-bill-employees-may-20...
- stack_framer 5mo agoWow, the way Upwork is handling this seems really bad. They announced the layoffs today, but nobody will know who is being let go until next week! Sheesh.
- DuckConference 5mo agoIDGI. 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?
- jgalt212 5mo agoUnlike the other hyperscalers, they don't attempt to wring every last dollar from their customers' wallets.
- redwood 5mo agoCloudflare'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
- fch42 5mo ago"velocity" is not "frequency"; someone throwing semi-finished products at the wall to see what sticks surely has frequent product launches. But even if these ship fast from inception to launch, this scattergun approach does not scale to provide product maintenance or support. It's a productivity smokescreen for lack of a product strategy, and claiming AI will substitute for support/maintenance fits straight in with that. Anything but coherent strategy, that. Maybe here's an unexplored AI opportunity.
- edoggie 5mo agoWhy 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.
- skybrian 5mo agoI 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?
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoIt'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!
- talkingtab 5mo agoBuilding 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.
- anymouse123456 5mo agoThe hollowing out of another iconic American brand begins.
- root_axis 5mo agoThe 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.
- parliament32 5mo agoIt's AI but not in the way you think. AI usage is getting expensive since Anthropic et al are turning the screws, and that money has to come from somewhere. Reducing AI usage is blasphemy of course, so cutting headcount is the only path forward.
- jazzyjackson 5mo agoIs there no one figuring out ROI on AI spend vs human payroll? I can't make sense of this idea that companies are firing productive employees because they're spending too much money on AI that isn't doing anything for them... they still hope chatbots will be worth it in the future?
- blitzar 5mo ago> ROI on AI spend You say that shit like that at the top table and you will be gone within the hour.
- FartyMcFarter 5mo agoThe FOMO is real with execs and AI.
- jjulius 5mo agoI've said that shit at the top table and I'm still there. In fact it started some great conversations to ensure we're doing just that.
- farfatched 5mo ago
- jauntywundrkind 5mo agoThey also reported Q1 revenue up 34% YoY. https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43 https://www.techmeme.com/260507/p43 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflare-to-cut-one-fifth-of-workers-in-move-to-ai-first-model https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/cloudflar...
- passive 5mo agoMy 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.
- sandeepkd 5mo agoCompanies 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.
- neonstatic 5mo ago> When a company is so much motivated by the profits That is what a company is for.
- sandeepkd 5mo agoI think this is the reason why the detailed definition of companies varies, the motivation and regulation on a company varies too. Absent the regulations, financial institutions would have run off with the money by now
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoIs the job market bad?
- izend 5mo agoPrince is claiming they laid off very few SWEs, I know at least an entire team of SWEs. https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2052560831909433554?s=20 https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2052560831909433554?s=20
- cfthrow96765 5mo agoDoubt. The eng teams I know lost 15-25% of their SWEs.
- hecat3 5mo agoThe sre team I was hired onto last month, just lost 2 of ~12. Cynically: our team hired two (me, senior, and a junior) and then we lost two (staff, guy who had been around since the founding, and a senior+ guy)... I kinda assume they baked in some of the layoff decisions into their past quarter or two of hiring to reduce seniority, and salaries, overall. Really short-sighted. I was still needing to get some 1:1s scheduled with the guy who'd been here for Forever and knew which closets had all the skeletons stashed away. Can't do that now.
- _t2kx 5mo agoPrince is a sociopathic liar
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ricardo_lien 5mo agoDid they find the vibecoding secret sauce?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- blabbleblobble 5mo agoSaving Cost for the Future.
- computersuck 5mo agoShameless title.
- tsh3lley 5mo agoIf you were impacted Magnetic (AI Tax Prep for CPA firms) is hiring senior - staff level engineers in SF https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic 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)
- stonecharioteer 5mo agoI interviewed there over a month ago and they ghosted me after 3 good rounds. I dodged a bullet it seems.
- OptionOfT 5mo agoI interviewed, they didn't want to allow remote, requiring me to immovable move to Dallas. The rest of the team was in 5 other cities. I'd have to move to sit in an office to jump on a Zoom. ...
- penguin_booze 5mo agoExecutive: "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".
- phendrenad2 5mo agoI 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.
- nomorewords 5mo agoWouldn't the layoffs be when the price changes are announced then? Isn't going all in on current credit prices mean that you use as many parallel work streams as possible?
- faangguyindia 5mo ago20% 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.
- natas 5mo ago[dead]
- keithnz 5mo agoI'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).
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- kristjansson 5mo ago> 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?
- argee 5mo agoI think about investing in Cloudflare but that P/E ratio scares me off every time.
- therealdrag0 5mo agoTheir revenue is growing 30% yoy, so investors are speculating it to pay off in the end.
- epolanski 5mo agoThe more they grow the harder it is to follow such rates.
- jdasdf 5mo agoThey don't have a PE ratio. They have never made a profit.
- OJFord 5mo agoNaN is scary
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoPE ratio too high! Sir, that is price/revenue ratio (jawdrop)
- deadbabe 5mo agoDon’t worry about P/E ratio. If you worry about P/E ratio all the time you would have missed every major tech opportunity for the past decade.
- yathartha 5mo agoThey 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.
- dares2573 5mo agodisappointing
- JulianQuinn 5mo agoThe day I switched to cloudflare for my domains... one of the best days in my life.
- conradfr 5mo agoCan the disgruntled ex-employees contribute to the Puppeteer Stealth plugin? ;)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- arjie 5mo agoMakes 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.
- staticassertion 5mo agoOkay, so what is Cloudflare's "DVD" equivalent? And what about AI necessitates smaller teams?
- Vipsy 5mo agoThey should have fired 11 people more and match their public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1
- christkv 5mo agoI would think cloudflare would benefit from all the vibe-coded apps as it is an easy target to deploy these on.
- funnyduck123 5mo agoyou 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
- funnyduck123 5mo agohey now i am from msk,russia and i work as an aenginner, married
- zeafoamrun 5mo agoWhat 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.
- dndx 5mo agoReally 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
- mhd 5mo agoSurprised that this isn't part of a "journey"…
- 948382828528 5mo ago[dead]
- Plywood1 5mo agoTBH 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.
- Pwntastic 5mo ago6. ceo/cto see the writing on the wall and exit before any blame sticks, receive a nice exit package, find another company to ruin
- karel-3d 5mo ago"AI will not replace you, it will just supercharge your existing capabilities." "lol jk it will totally replace you, bye"
- qsuqwsuw167 5mo ago[flagged]
- funnyduck123 5mo agoin a ten 10 years like this ai enthsiasts crowd the world, we'd be getting starving cuase nobody wants to grow plants and be farmers. only chemical food and dirty water that's ai advantage
- funnyduck123 5mo agocorporation ai monsters now will be brainwashing you and we'll be under control of ai .... that's a pity end of humanbeings but with greedy governments and bankers, only way we can aford now is to live somewhere at the end of the world in Nebraska build a barn and never go to big cities. all i want for my children is pure air and water but this fecking boots on the ground like us army marching in ukraine and nato shaking nuclear weapons around my home.
- slowgramming 5mo ago[dead]
- fithisux 5mo agoMy 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.
- schnitzelstoat 5mo agoAll 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.
- kgk9000 5mo ago"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.
- jcmfernandes 5mo agoI 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.
- throwaw12 5mo agoPeople 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?
- kypro 5mo ago2008 really wasn't that bad if you were in tech... No idea about 2001, but I've heard it was fairly rough. More recently I've seen people say now it's harder to find work today, I think in part because in 2001 it was mostly tech companies laying off talent, while corporates who were less impacted by the dot-com bubble were still building out their engineering teams.
- kilroy123 5mo agoI agree. It was still ok for most people in tech. Maybe rough for that single year. After that is was nothing but boom times. I can't speak to 2001. This feels like something much worse and weirder.
- roryirvine 5mo agoThe problem with the 2001 dot com bust was that it came on the heels of the telecoms downturn, so the two biggest (at the time) tech sectors were in trouble simultaneously. Yes, there was still corporate IT - and some areas like finance were positively booming. But for online retail, media, advertising, etc it was a wasteland for 4-5 years. Plenty of people never found a way back into the industry. To me, it felt much worse then than it does now (though perhaps the USA is being hit much harder at the moment). 2008 did hit tech but, outside of finance, the shock was over much quicker. The effects on the bricks & mortar economy were more obvious, though, so it got covered more in the media.
- borplk 5mo agoI don't remember 2001. But 2008 tech job market was way wayyy better than today.
- nonameiguess 5mo ago2008 the global economy came somewhere between hours to days of completely crashing if AIG hadn't been bailed out. Other than Covid, it's only the second time in the past 50 years unemployment hit double-digits, the other time being the early 80s recession in the wake of the 1979 energy crisis, which saw inflation go as high as 13.5% and the prime interest rate hit 21.5%. You're probably only concerned about your own industry, but even now, unemployment is still around the lowest it's been since WWII outside of the past couple of years and the late 50s. It'll be another 40 years hopefully to get a full lifetime of experience and see how I ultimately feel about this, but right now, my sense is software saw a huge boom in the 2010s, a la aerospace in the 60s and finance in the 90s, and it isn't going to die, but that boom was never going to last forever, either. Being a specialist surgeon was always the only true close to guarantee you'll make half a mil annually with supreme job security. Everything else sees booms, busts, regional disparities, and power laws that make it hard to even talk to each other about it because nobody's experience is universal. Even now, in my particular niche of the industry, I don't know anybody who's been laid off. My own company and our competitors are not exactly drowning in cash (I work largely on commission and it's been a terrible quarter), but we're expanding headcount, not reducing. Conversely, in the 2010s as software boomed and I did terrifically, basically my entire family is in trades and it was totally different for them. Drastic cyclical instability, projects started but then canceled all over the place, injuries, bankruptcies, drug addiction, prison terms. But that's also in California. I live in Texas and construction here seemingly mostly stayed in the boom state. All the tradesmen I know from here rather than family did much better. We also had roughneck as a lucrative fallback option for anyone that didn't mind living in the middle of nowhere thanks to the fracking and shale booms. Computer geeks from 2006 to 2021 or so also had that kind of easy skill transfer fallback thing thanks to the boom in computational data analytics due to advances in data storage and machine learning technologies. We might even do well to remember that hyperscalers drowning in ad money for the past 20 years had a practice of intentionally overhiring to hoard talent but not give them anything productive to do, putting them into restrictive NDAs and non-competes largely to prevent them from starting their own companies or working for competitors. If that practice is ending, it floods the labor market, driving down wages, and reduces industry-wide employment metrics, but it's not death of the profession so much as ending a market distortion. Maybe it even supercharges entrepreneurialism, but right now we just seem to see a boom in the "solo indie dev" putting out reams of slop. At some point, people have to actually work together and have a real product vision that solves a problem other than using AI to make dev tools to harness AI for making more dev tools.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- eis 5mo agoInterestingly 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.
- alex_suzuki 5mo ago-24% now
- ankitsanghi 5mo agoOof. I guess cloudflare is also gonna have an uptime monitor like Claude now.
- meindnoch 5mo agoSure, but at least agents can now buy domains!
- jackdoe 5mo agofirst slowly, then all at once.
- alex_suzuki 5mo ago> 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.
- oncallthrow 5mo ago> 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
- _t2kx 5mo ago[flagged]
- philipwhiuk 5mo agoSome 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.
- svara 5mo agoIsn'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.
- losvedir 5mo agoWow, 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.
- efficax 5mo agolayoffs are winning in the short term. investors love them, and if you cut staff but keep revenue that’s profit.
- beepboopboop 5mo agoFrom the announcement it doesn’t seem like they’re losing, just that they’re cutting off their employees winnings.
- johndhi 5mo ago20% is a crazy number. This is scary, as someone who works in this industry.
- tlogan 5mo agoLets not miss the obvious: cloudflare is not profitable. I believe the board is probably telling the management that they need to cut costs. All this “AI bla bla efficiency bla bla agents bla bla” is a convenient excuse.
- yawboakye 5mo ago“pour encourager les autres.”
- cocoacat 5mo agoTheir 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.
- evdubs 5mo agoTheir valuation is crazy. Trading at $260, with no profit, their price:sales ratio was 36x (extremely high). Now, trading at $195, their price:forward earnings ratio is 130x (extremely high). Unless they crushed earnings and revenue estimates and juiced their forward guidance, Cloudflare stock could have gone anywhere. Also, the stock is trading where it was a month ago.
- cmiles8 5mo agoThese all follow a same pattern now: 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.”
- encrypted_bird 5mo agoThat would require the CEOs to admit they messed up.
- punkbit 5mo agoGosh... 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?
- carlos-menezes 5mo ago> Couldn’t some of them be given the opportunity to adapt to new priorities or ways of working? They could. You should be asking whether they want to or not.
- davebren 5mo ago> What exactly is so fundamentally difficult in 2026 that someone with years of experience can’t learn? It's having the experience to point out all the issues in the generated code that's the issue. The interns they hired won't have the experience to push back and slow the slop machine down.
- spprashant 5mo agoThis 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.
- bogzz 5mo agoOptimism?
- fcpguru 5mo agowhat does this mean for https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/ 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.
- baggachipz 5mo ago"You either die the heroic startup, or you live to become the MBA'd villain"
- farceSpherule 5mo ago[dead]
- realty_geek 5mo agoDoes anyone know if it will affect emdash (an attempt by cloudflare to build an alternative to wordpress - launched on April first this year)?
- docmars 5mo agoThat's not good, Cloudflare. Shame on you.
- mrkramer 5mo agoI 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.
- qu8n 5mo agoNot 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.
- mihaTrajbaric 5mo agoSorry 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 https://www.luxonis.com/about-us#devops-engineer
- tgtweak 5mo ago>Cloudflare expects second-quarter revenue of $664 million to $665 million, just under analysts' estimate of $665.3 million Is this considered below expectations on wallstreet... enough to merit an 18% stock cut?
- cr125rider 5mo agoAnalysts are the worst…
- narush 5mo ago[flagged]
- aleksanb 5mo agoYou can lead an american to his firing, but you can't make him unionize.
- drillsteps5 5mo ago"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.
- basyt 5mo agojust finance things. nothing to see here...
- JDevAlper 5mo ago[dead]
- OptionOfT 5mo agoAnother thought I had: 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.
- aspir 5mo agoAt 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975839 Happy to answer any questions, though I only check HN about once a day.
- lyton 5mo agoFyi, the CEO claims[0] they fired very few engineers. The prime target were allegedly salespeople 0: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2052560831909433554 https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2052560831909433554
- bijowo1676 5mo agomakes sense, their revenue is atrocious
- jmtame 5mo agoThis comment should be higher given how much FUD is in these comments. Hacker News having a meltdown about a bunch of backoffice folks getting laid off while they’re still aggressively hiring SWEs is… something
- laidoff2026 5mo agoMANY engineers were fired. including some of the best I've ever met. don't believe the CEOs lies.
- eng1n0ir 5mo ago"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
- eng1n0ir 5mo ago"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
- rekabis 5mo agoHow about the company just up and dies? 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.
- abdiisabel2 5mo ago[flagged]
- htx80nerd 5mo agoi will never work for one of these mega big tech companies. making tons of $$$ then fire you. have a nice day.
- keeda 5mo agoA 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. Hope this helps, and all the best!
- artyom 5mo agoI understand that your advice comes from the right place. However "High-agency" is the "Full-stack Engineer" of the AI era. A single salary covering many disparage positions and roles. It's been reworded b/c with AI, apparently you don't even need to be an engineer (or expect to be paid as one) anymore! Nothing new under the sun.
- 5mo ago
- Abhijeet620380 5mo agoNice project. The interface feels clean and fast.
- osigurdson 5mo agoIt seems the market decided to cut 20% of Cloudflare's market cap today.
- danaw 5mo agowish 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)
- kaeshiwaza 5mo agoAI is so ineffective that compagnies that use it cannot pay their workers ! Poor guys tech bros.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- xenadu02 5mo agoYou 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.
- Havoc 5mo agoSurprising that the share price took a dip on this. Normally retrenchments are seen as a plus
- Jehoshua 5mo agoHow 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. So let’s hope for the day after tomorrow.
- Jehoshua 5mo agoHow 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. So let’s hope for the day after tomorrow!
- 129x_space 5mo ago[flagged]
- runamok 5mo agoBy the way, I love that their stock lost ~23% after this decision. I assume the C suite thought this would goose the stock like all the other companies pulling this...
- taguniversalsw 5mo agohttps://open.substack.com/pub/earthchronicles/p/building-for-the-future https://open.substack.com/pub/earthchronicles/p/building-for...
- damnesian 5mo agoWith the alarming explosion of never-before realized security exploits, this really doesn't seem like the best time in history to turn the day-to-day running of a massive security platform like Cloudflare over to AI.
- lollipopboy 5mo agoThe CEO of this company is worth close to $7 billion. So I don't buy the lame limp-wristed argument about laying people off due to AI. So if the CEO reads this? Put yourself in the shoes of all the people you laid off just now. Those people that have families, who all they were ever trying to do is maybe save up a million dollars so they could retire. In doing so despite the company making record profits. While you have enough money to buy yourself a damned cruise ship and then some. What are you going to do with all that money anyway?
- joelwallis 5mo ago"Building for the future"... then, "we're firing 1K+ people." What a BS.