Cloudflare fired 1,100 people the same week they beat earnings

The memo opened with "Today is a hard day." Cloudflare laid off 1,100 workers — 20% of its entire workforce — and that's the line they led with. Hard for whom, exactly.

Because here's what else happened that week: Q1 adjusted EPS up to 25 cents from 16 cents a year earlier. Free cash flow jumped from $52.9 million to $84.1 million. Revenue hit $639.8 million and beat Wall Street. The company is doing fine. The company is doing great. They just decided the humans who built that are now optional. The memo called it "reimagining every internal process, team, and role" to honor their mission to "help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere." The 1,100 people who got cut were apparently not part of everyone.

The framing here is the tell. This wasn't a struggling company making hard cuts to survive. This was a profitable company using AI as cover to shed labor costs and call it vision. "Agentic AI-first" is just downsizing with a press release that sounds like a TED talk. The severance is real — pay through end of 2026, healthcare included — and that's better than most. But don't let the generous exit package obscure what actually happened: a company posted record profits and record layoffs in the same week, and the CEO called it building for the future. Future for who.