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Cloudflare fires 1100 employees.
whynotlearn
Member
https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
(The thing that I really passionately dislike about this is that they have named it as building for the future that I was first oblivious myself about what the reality of the situation is until I found out scrolling)
I would be really really interested to hear what the providers who are in the business's thoughts about it. I used to hold cloudflare to such an high pristine standard and that glass is starting to crack or atleast doubt its stability more than usual.
(I am unsure if someone else has already posted this or not though as one of my other posts, I just like to share news to Lowendtalk)
Edit (just this line): It seems to be absolutely worth mentioning that this is 20% of the entire workforce for cloudflare that they have just fired,
My (personal) thoughts:
I used to really think that as a business, cloudflare was one of the best businesses in the gig of hosting and things related to servers and it must be making an absolute bank like nothing else and so the idea of firing so many employees has definitely put a wrench into that line of thinking personally.
Reading more into this, I should probably read even more about it and I will update the story if any info comes but any of this/the way lay-off has been carried by Cloudflare, from my understanding, don't look quite inspiring as much as I expected from cloudflare at the moment. I used to really like Cloudflare a lot so that has come as a bit of shocker to me, yes.
The thing to me which feels like an issue is that these AI token costs are ballooning up for these companies. Atleast that is what some people have suggested within the case of coinbase which has also laid off thousands of its employees when people looked at its financial sheets.
Comments
Its business as usual
No one should be emotionally attached to any provider.
C'est la vie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, It's just that Cloudflare has always been felt to me like something absolutely stable (maybe even too stable), so I didn't expect such massive layoffs and a lot of their responses and those of people fired from what I can tell (as I have said previously), don't feel quite confidence inspiring, so It definitely puts cracks into the stability of cloudflare itself which is quite frankly a huge selling point of it.
obligatory Die Cloudflare Die
We need a strong cloudflare alternative otherwise the influence of Cloudflare as a whole on internet might not change. Bunny is recommended, and don't get me wrong it probably is decent, but with the storage fiasco it had previously, it wasn't much confidence inspiring too. We definitely more alternatives in this space if any provider is reading and the market can absorb/welcome new competition too perhaps (imho personally)
Fuck Cloudflare because it centralizes so much of the internet. But, with that said, if anyone is going to centralize all of the internet, I'm glad it's them. They have a pretty solid reputation for protecting privacy and being relatively light on censorship. They also work hard to improve security on the internet by pushing for PQC, ECH, DoT/DoH, etc. Sure, they aren't perfect, but just imagine if Microsoft was the premier CDN and WAF.
But the mere fact that they centralize everything makes them an attractive target for nation state adversaries, and that alone is a serious problem and a big reason why we need more players on the field.
does bunny even exist in the same universe as cf? come on.
And yet somehow they've never managed to turn a profit.
If you're reading between the lines:
That is true, but I think that's also because Cloudflare and these tech corporations are basically shoving AI to people in general, but that being said, I do wonder where these thousands of AI sessions are really ended up being used on. I know cloudflare matrix, oauth and some other projects which are AI generated but these shouldn't cost so much in generation.
I think that another reasonable line I have seen is that cloudflare has actually not reached some of their (goals?) and so they laid off employees also to help soften the blow from their other losses. (Yes stock markets somehow react positively to layoffs as sad as it sounds)
The thing now with these is that these layoffs are really disingenuous (building the future) and we are also unable to understand exactly if they did it because of AI itself or because they are using it as a convenient response and the thing is that the company would never come out in public and try to be completely honest about it, so it might be up to some speculation.
Probably analysis rather than vibe coding.
Cloudflare has vibe coded an matrix client, and Oauth library, that wordpress alternative they launched. Although I can agree that they might be doing analysis too, but they are also doing vibe coding if you would be interested to know that.
Read this
https://blog.cloudflare.com/internal-ai-engineering-stack/
In the last 30 days, 93% of Cloudflare’s R&D organization used AI coding tools powered by infrastructure we built on our own platform.
AI Gateway (last 30 days, combined)
Workers AI (last 30 days)
Give or take, $1-5M/month on tokens alone
Firing 1100 employees would save 10-87% depending on their token blend
I know, but I imagine most of their tokens are not spent on that. That's what I meant.
I'm a little confused here. Are they firing 1.1k employees because they're using too much AI tokens? or are they firing because those who are using AI are generating more value than those being fired?
This actually reads as if they spent SO much money on agentic AI and such that they needed to reduce payroll to cover the costs.
Someone on HN pointed out that last September they announced that they're hiring 1,100 interns...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/
Hmmm. Couldn't be that they are terming more expensive, older staff and replacing them with younger, cheaper staff...naw, I'm sure they wouldn't do that...
I like Cloudflare cutting costs and surviving over going downhill.
Because no one even at a reasonable price can match what Cloudfare provides for free.
Before Cloudflare, some companies charged $1000 per month for limited layer 3 DDoS protection.
since then costs have decreased alot because of cloudfare, but even today most of the other companies paid plans cannot match cloudflare's features and filtering capabilities.
When the entire industry from Google to Microsoft is laying off employees and moving to AI, Cloudflare will fail if they don't.
Cloudflare has never turned a profit.
yeah... even they are developing new Internet standards with the community. If I'm not wrong http2/http3 Quic, and connection retention and other such big and small technologies they've built/contributed to it worth for making sites safer and faster.
Fired up people in wake of massive LLM adoption... And now we will see how CF will roll downhill from this very moment. Bugs, oopsies and damages. And here you go - CF will hire again, for "better future".
Happens to best of companies
When leadership on top puts $$ over more $$$$$ cracks surface.
Is it their goal though?
Looks like they have a good accountant
The Amazon business model.
good luck cloud flare managing all that ai slob code.
https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/KTKyzSB1K3b229TX74:
Oracle also firing 30,000.
https://rollingout.com/2026/03/31/oracle-slashes-30000-jobs-with-a-cold-6/
September 2025:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/
They are definitely not just offshoring 1100 jobs
Oracle will fuck themselves going all in on datacenters that will be late, more expensive, and under utilized when they finally do.
Its like dot com doom all over again. I remember this from the 2000's. But the cycle bust waves are getting more frequent. The fintech & crypto bust is not too long ago. +- 3 year ago. And now the ai doom.