Cloudflare to Lay Off 20% of Workforce for AI Shift

Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based internet infrastructure and cybersecurity company, announced on Thursday that it will lay off about 20 percent of its global workforce, affecting more than 1,100 employees out of 5,156 full-time staff as of the end of 2025. The cuts stem from a restructuring to adopt an "agentic AI-first operating model," with executives emphasizing that the changes reflect evolving processes rather than employee performance issues or short-term cost savings.

In a message to employees from co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn, posted on the company's blog, the executives wrote, "The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed." They noted that internal AI tool usage has surged more than sixfold in the past three months, with teams in engineering, operations, finance, support, HR, and marketing now running thousands of AI agent sessions daily. The restructuring aims to redesign roles and workflows for faster AI-assisted execution and product development.

The announcement coincided with Cloudflare's first-quarter earnings report for the period ended March 31, which exceeded Wall Street expectations. Revenue rose 34...