I dislike the title because it doesn't clearly state it's a layoff. "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative with a roadmap outlining plans.
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are someone like 95% profit.
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
Welp, looks like I’m affected. If anyone is looking to hire a systems engineer with distributed systems and load balancing experience, shoot me an email at <anything>@piperswe.me :/
There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't. Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it.
This genuinely wouldn't surprise me, and I need to go back to looking at balance sheets to see if I can sus out the validity of that narrative. As AI subsidization ends prematurely and costs skyrocket, we should expect to see those costs reflected in the operation statements of major customers.
Since I had Coinbase up for review already, I decided to peek there first for any sort of correlation. In 2023, their "Technology and Development" line item shows $1.32bn going out, and by 2025 it'd ballooned to $1.67bn. This is despite headcount actually contracting by almost a thousand people between those two statements, which would normally mean a smaller technology spend since a lot of corporate software is seat-based nowadays. This suggests that yeah, actually AI spend is creating a heavier drag on the balance sheets and it's being offset with layoffs since the "job replacement" narrative is strong. That said, I'd need to check dozens' more balance sheets to draw any sort of industry-wide conclusion.
This 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.
Personally, 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.
investors are not some nefarious monolith cheering for companies to make decisions based on how it benefits The Vibes. they're analysts assessing business decisions.
I 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.
> 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
I'm going to start calling these "Canary" moments.
Assuming we take everything at face value for these sorts of cuts, it creates the following scenario:
A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI while also posting substantial profit or revenue growth. The company could downsize the workforce to capitalize on short-term efficiencies and increase margins, though this will come at the cost of long-term reputational harm due to posted profits/health as well as burning out staff who must do the same (or increasingly, more) work with less headcount, leading to attrition when the market shifts in their favor. Alternatively, it could leverage this surplus labor for a period of moonshot R&D or paying down technical/process debts while they have the capacity and the profit to pay for it, which harms short-term share price relative to their competitors slashing jobs, while improving the company's capabilities in the marketplace in the long-run, potentially through mastery of these AI tools or the creation of new product lines.
The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.
I know it's probably automatic because of the similar titles, but hitting the bottom of the layoff announcement only to be recommended that article about hiring 1,111 interns in 2026 is a reaaal bad look
Worst part about the ai era is that so many are convinced they can and need to be on top of it to the extent of losing their core competency while mass producing trash
It’s good stuff but there’s room for a lot of things
Letting go 1,100 people into a bleak job market. Absolutely awful.
It wouldn't shock me if people formerly in tech have changed careers entirely, seemingly every tech-focused company is laying people off in favour of AI.
It looks like they are using the "agentic AI era" as an excuse to restructure in order to boost margins. GAAP gross margin dropped ~5 points YoY (76% -> 71%)
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 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.
That's 2 major layoffs this week (Coinbase being the other). Is there an underlying common reason for this? And is it indeed AI-driven productivity as both companies claim?
There'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.
Whenever 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.
I 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.
With the hiring 1111 interns thing, I think these companies (amazon as well) need to realize this is doing anything but inspiring confidence in those interns. Instead of being excited about going there, more of them would opt to go elsewhere instead of returning full time, or if they do return full time they'd be in fear of being let go next.
It’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.
Companies 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.
> 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
Cutting salaries to pay the AI costs for the remaining engineers. Going to be rough as this trickles through the entire economy over the next 10 years.
Any other engineers just living life frozen at this point. I am unable to make any life decisions because it seems like I won't have a career in the near future. I am unable to purchase a home to settle down for my family, because dad might not have a job next week. I know I am fortunate to have a job, many don't, but fuck if this career isn't the worse thing ever for my overall health and happiness.
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?
> 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.
I dislike the title because it doesn't clearly state it's a layoff. "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative with a roadmap outlining plans.
This is what the true definition of "AGI" is.
Two 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
Welcome to the corporate world
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere." As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are someone like 95% profit.
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
Welp, looks like I’m affected. If anyone is looking to hire a systems engineer with distributed systems and load balancing experience, shoot me an email at <anything>@piperswe.me :/
I’ll update this with a resume link tonight…
That 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.
There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't. Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it.
Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
This genuinely wouldn't surprise me, and I need to go back to looking at balance sheets to see if I can sus out the validity of that narrative. As AI subsidization ends prematurely and costs skyrocket, we should expect to see those costs reflected in the operation statements of major customers.
Since I had Coinbase up for review already, I decided to peek there first for any sort of correlation. In 2023, their "Technology and Development" line item shows $1.32bn going out, and by 2025 it'd ballooned to $1.67bn. This is despite headcount actually contracting by almost a thousand people between those two statements, which would normally mean a smaller technology spend since a lot of corporate software is seat-based nowadays. This suggests that yeah, actually AI spend is creating a heavier drag on the balance sheets and it's being offset with layoffs since the "job replacement" narrative is strong. That said, I'd need to check dozens' more balance sheets to draw any sort of industry-wide conclusion.
This 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.
Personally, 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.
cloudflare stock went down, genius
investors are not some nefarious monolith cheering for companies to make decisions based on how it benefits The Vibes. they're analysts assessing business decisions.
I 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.
> 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
In Europe they’re pretty much obligated to provide this package
Definitely not true in the UK. This is extremely rare for it's generosity. I've never seen anything like this in the UK.
Complete fiction. Over covid it was common in big tech layoffs to get much less severance in Europe than US.
I'm going to start calling these "Canary" moments.
Assuming we take everything at face value for these sorts of cuts, it creates the following scenario:
A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI while also posting substantial profit or revenue growth. The company could downsize the workforce to capitalize on short-term efficiencies and increase margins, though this will come at the cost of long-term reputational harm due to posted profits/health as well as burning out staff who must do the same (or increasingly, more) work with less headcount, leading to attrition when the market shifts in their favor. Alternatively, it could leverage this surplus labor for a period of moonshot R&D or paying down technical/process debts while they have the capacity and the profit to pay for it, which harms short-term share price relative to their competitors slashing jobs, while improving the company's capabilities in the marketplace in the long-run, potentially through mastery of these AI tools or the creation of new product lines.
The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.
That's the thing. There is no surplus labour capacity, neither they have any ideas for moonshot projects that could pay off left
I think as someone pointed out earlier, this is more likely about margin preservation as their gross margins are deteriorating really quickly.
I know it's probably automatic because of the similar titles, but hitting the bottom of the layoff announcement only to be recommended that article about hiring 1,111 interns in 2026 is a reaaal bad look
Kind of makes me wonder if the "more than 1,100 employees globally" actually means "1,111" employees. Talk about committing to the bit
Worst part about the ai era is that so many are convinced they can and need to be on top of it to the extent of losing their core competency while mass producing trash
It’s good stuff but there’s room for a lot of things
Yikes, this sucks.
It is ironic that Cloudflare is letting go 1100 of employees, while roughly 6-7 months ago, they were aiming to hire 1111 interns.
Article: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/
Letting go 1,100 people into a bleak job market. Absolutely awful.
It wouldn't shock me if people formerly in tech have changed careers entirely, seemingly every tech-focused company is laying people off in favour of AI.
It looks like they are using the "agentic AI era" as an excuse to restructure in order to boost margins. GAAP gross margin dropped ~5 points YoY (76% -> 71%)
Yikes, so incremental margins are in the 50s. I think this says it all.
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 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.
When you announce 639m USD revenue for q1 Then lay off a thousand people because you love the smell of your ai farts.
Revenue != profit.
Thousand people cost 60m USD of quarterly _profit_ though (not even revenue)
That's 2 major layoffs this week (Coinbase being the other). Is there an underlying common reason for this? And is it indeed AI-driven productivity as both companies claim?
There'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.
Employees 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.
You couldn't tell this by looking at the stock market.
Zirp ended over 4 years ago, what are you talking about, the us economy is collapsing? What? Care to elaborate on any of this?
Whenever 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?
>especially someone with a username like yours,
> -- blingbot9 2026
a new level of ad hominem
I 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.
Is Coinbase that major though? they're always doing lay-offs.
Coinbase 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.
With the hiring 1111 interns thing, I think these companies (amazon as well) need to realize this is doing anything but inspiring confidence in those interns. Instead of being excited about going there, more of them would opt to go elsewhere instead of returning full time, or if they do return full time they'd be in fear of being let go next.
Obviously AI is just a excuse
It’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.
why not? isn't the implication of your point that companies should just hire infinitely so long as there's work to be done?
Companies 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.
> 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
Why does "the future" in corporate announcements always mean layoffs?
Cutting salaries to pay the AI costs for the remaining engineers. Going to be rough as this trickles through the entire economy over the next 10 years.
Thats a solid package tbh
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?
20%
Any other engineers just living life frozen at this point. I am unable to make any life decisions because it seems like I won't have a career in the near future. I am unable to purchase a home to settle down for my family, because dad might not have a job next week. I know I am fortunate to have a job, many don't, but fuck if this career isn't the worse thing ever for my overall health and happiness.
well at least they're getting some decent severance, still sucks, especially in this market.
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?
Cloudflare has achieved "AGI" internally.
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.
https://polymarket.com/event/another-critical-cloudflare-inc...
> 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 future, for those who have the capital. The rest may die, shareholders don't care.
Fucking billionaires. Kill them all
> 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..
"I have decided to sacrifice some of you for shareholder value, but that is something I am willing to do"