Tech giant Cloudflare to axe over 1,100 jobs - as it announces surge in revenue

‘The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed,’ the tech firm’s co-founders said on the company blog - as they also announced a 34 percent year on year increase in revenue

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Tech giant Cloudflare is planning to cut more than 1,100 employees worldwide.

The web infrastructure provider announced the move on the same day that it reported its first-quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million, a 34 percent increase year-on-year, according to a company press release.

Co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn confirmed the job losses in an email sent to employees and shared on the company’s blog. In the email, the co-founders noted that the brand’s use of artificial intelligence had rocketed by more than 600 percent over the past three months.

“The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed,” the email, which was posted under the title Building for the future, read.

Cloudflare says that over 1000 employees will be axed amid its internal use of A.I. increasing by 600 percent over the past three months

open image in galleryCloudflare says that over 1000 employees will be axed amid its internal use of A.I. increasing by 600 percent over the past three months (Reuters)

It said employees in human resources, marketing, finance and engineering all run “thousands” of AI agent sessions per day. “That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era,” the email reads.

Cloudflare reported having 5,156 full-time employees at the end of 2025 in its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was obtained by The San Francisco Chronicle. That means around a fifth of the company’s jobs will be axed in the move.

“It’s not an easy day, but it’s the right decision,” the post reads.

Those departing the company will be offered a package which includes the equivalent of their full base pay through the end of 2026. In the United States, employees will continue to be provided with healthcare support through to the end of the year.

Referring to the cuts, the email continues: “We’ve asked the team to do this only once, as hard as that may be today. We don’t want to do it again for the foreseeable future.”

On the same day, the company publicly reported that its first-quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million.

“We had a very strong start to 2026,” Prince wrote in the release. “A.I. is driving a fundamental re-platforming of the Internet and a paradigm shift in how software is created and consumed; it’s shaping up to be the biggest tailwind we’ve ever seen in Cloudflare’s history.”

open image in galleryCo-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn publicly confirmed the move on the company's blog (Getty)

In that same announcement, Cloudflare said that it estimates that it will incur charges between $140 million and $150 million in connection with its plan to reduce its workforce.

Around $105 million to $110 million of that estimate relates to the expenditures for notice periods, severance payments and employee benefits. The release says that the remaining $35 million to $40 million is related to the vesting of share-based awards.

Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Prince, Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway. According to its website, the firm serves data from 335 cities in over 125 countries around the world.