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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.” ®
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