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Posted by PriorityLeft 19 hours ago

Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce(www.reuters.com)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
1003 points | 689 commentspage 5
tlogan 3 hours ago|
Lets 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.

llama052 17 hours ago||
It'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 15 hours ago|
it's about the comments / votes ratio.
CWwdcdk7h 8 hours ago||
To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that.
swyx 7 hours ago||
why 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
smileson2 18 hours ago||
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

alex_suzuki 4 hours 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.

pcdevils 18 hours ago||
When you announce 639m USD revenue for q1 Then lay off a thousand people because you love the smell of your ai farts.
cortesoft 15 hours ago||
Yes, 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.

twothumbsup 3 hours ago||
Expenses 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
tick_tock_tick 16 hours ago|||
Are you trolling or just trying to avoid saying they didn't make any money and actually lost over $20 million?
pcdevils 8 hours ago||
Flippant 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.
nine_k 18 hours ago|||
Revenue != profit.
nlitened 18 hours ago||
Thousand people cost 60m USD of quarterly _profit_ though (not even revenue)
trollied 17 hours ago||
That’s not how accounting works.
svara 4 hours ago||
Isn'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.

RSHEPP 18 hours ago||
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.
llama052 17 hours ago||
Yeah 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.
crackinmalackin 10 hours ago|||
Absolutely. 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 8 hours ago|||
Yes - I was thinking about starting my own business but am staying put instead and saving as much as possible.
greenie_beans 2 hours ago||
now seems like the perfect time to start a business?
alex_suzuki 1 hour ago||
If you have savings
fzeroracer 17 hours ago||
I'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.

rohitpaulk 18 hours ago||
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?
stego-tech 18 hours ago||
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.

BirdieNZ 15 hours 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-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.

j2jj 16 hours ago||||
Its 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.
13a07e686ca5 18 hours ago|||
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tardedmeme 18 hours ago|||
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.

sssilver 18 hours ago|||
You couldn't tell this by looking at the stock market.
citrin_ru 6 hours ago|||
Stock market is up only because investors bet on AI, if you'll exclude AI and AI supply chain at best it would be stagnant.
jazzyjackson 9 hours ago||||
To me, it just means a dollar doesn't buy as much of IBM as it used to.
XorNot 16 hours ago|||
Which 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.

lijok 18 hours ago||||
Zirp ended over 4 years ago, what are you talking about, the us economy is collapsing? What? Care to elaborate on any of this?
blingbot9 18 hours ago|||
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?

Havoc 18 hours ago||
>especially someone with a username like yours,

> -- blingbot9 2026

jwpapi 18 hours ago||
a new level of ad hominem
Overpower0416 8 hours ago|||
Coinbase lost 40% transaction revenue. The AI thing is just smokescreen

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/coinbase-s...

heldrida 2 hours ago|||
It seems that Bill.com and UpWork, too!
throwatdem12311 15 hours ago|||
AI productivity is a lie. It’s AI spending because the revenue hasn’t gone up.
strange_quark 18 hours ago|||
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.
saos 18 hours ago|||
Is Coinbase that major though? they're always doing lay-offs.
brazukadev 16 hours ago|||
Meta's layoff was also last week, much bigger than both.
sjZqahg 18 hours ago|||
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.

wrqvrwvq 17 hours ago||
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schnitzelstoat 6 hours ago||
All 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.

DuckConference 15 hours ago|
IDGI. 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 13 hours ago|
Unlike the other hyperscalers, they don't attempt to wring every last dollar from their customers' wallets.
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