Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

Off-Prem

Around 20 percent of staff get an ‘In one hour, you might not work here anymore’ email

Cloudflare
has revealed it will farewell 1,100 staff, due to its current and future use of
AI.

In a blog post that oozes
Orwellian “doublespeak,” CEO Matthew Prince and President/COO Michelle
Zatlyn used the headline “Building for the future” to share the email they sent
to all employees.

That mail opens: “We are writing to let you know directly
that we’ve made the decision to reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than
1,100 employees globally.”

The post explains, “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.”

All that AI 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.”

Sackings are therefore needed, and are “about defining how a
world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI
era.”

To rub salt into the wounds of sacked staff, the email went
out not long before Cloudflare announced quarterly results that included 34 percent
year-over-year revenue growth and guidance for 30 percent future growth.

Prince opened the company’s earnings call by stating “We had
a very strong start to 2026.”

Analysts on the earnings call asked Prince to explain the
layoffs and whether they will make Cloudflare stronger.

“We have seen that there are roles at Cloudflare that
are not the roles we need for the future,” Prince responded. “Just because you
are fit does not mean you cannot get fitter. Over the last six months
especially, the productivity gains from the people directly talking to
customers and directly creating code have been incredible, and a lot of the
support roles behind them are not going to be the roles that drive companies
going forward.”

The CEO said Cloudflare has “always lived a little bit in
the future” and said the company is an early beneficiary of AI.

And he said the company will keep hiring.

“The people embracing these tools are so much more
productive than we have ever seen before,” he said. “I would guess that in 2027
we will have more employees than we did at any point in 2026, but the roles are
changing dramatically, and you have to do something dramatic to make that
shift.”

“This is not about downsizing or saving costs,” Prince said.
“This is about having the right people in the right roles to build the future.”

As is often
the case these days, the email to staff warned them of a brief doomsday
countdown.

“Within
the next hour, every member of our global team will receive an email from both
of us clarifying how this change affects them,” the message states. “For those
departing today, we will send this update to both their personal and Cloudflare
addresses to ensure they receive the information immediately.”

The
Register imagines that went down well for workers in time zones where
employees might avoid their work email outside 9-5, but sneak an early-morning-or-late-night-glance
at their personal inboxes. 

Prince and Zatlyn
told employees they hope “to do this only once” and then contradict themselves by
saying they “don’t want to do it again for the foreseeable future.” 

“By taking decisive action now, we provide immediate clarity
to those departing and protect the stability of the team that remains,” they
wrote, before adding their view that one deep cut because “dragging a
reorganization out over multiple quarters creates prolonged emotional
uncertainty for employees and stalls our ability to build.”

 Firing 1,100 people is therefore “the right thing to do;
it’s the honest thing to do; and it reflects the values of the company we are
continuing to build.” ®