The Pink Slips Keep Coming: Cloudflare and Others Reduce Headcount

While Meta grabbed headlines with their layoffs, the rest of the tech industry has been quietly swinging the same axe.

Slash, slash, slashing jobs!

[For the complete Meta backstory, you can take a look at my posts from May 24 and yesterday].

One example I know of is Cloudfare. 

On May 07, 2026, the San Francisco, US-headquartered Internet infrastructure and cyber security company announced that they would trim 1,100 jobs, representing approximately 20% of their workforce across thirteen global offices. 

The leadership at Cloudfare had noted a 600% increase in internal AI use over a three-month period, reducing the need for headcount in specific back-office and support functions. 

This was candidly stated by CEO Matthew Prince that the restructuring around an "agentic AI-first operating model" is making many roles obsolete, significantly boosting productivity. 

The move is notable in the tech industry because it was initiated during a period of record-setting financial growth rather than a revenue decline.

Even the crypto and fintech world has not been spared. Block slashed 4,000 jobs. Coinbase let go of roughly 700 staff. PayPal plan to trim nearly 4,800 over the next few years. Website builders Wix and Webflow both announced rounds and enterprise software company Atlassian cut about 1,600. Many of these firms cited AI directly. 

However, there are dissenting voices. 

Demis Hassabis (left), Google DeepMind CEO told Wired in an interview published on May 19, 2026, just ahead of the Google I/O developer conference that when developers become 3 or 4 times more productive, the smart move is to do 3 or 4 times more work, not march people out the door. 

To him, treating AI gains as a reason to shrink headcount is a failure of nerve dressed up as strategy. 

Jensen Huang (left), Nvidia CEO had called the AI-to-layoffs narrative as "just too lazy". 

In a Channel NewsAsia interview on May 25, he pointedly asked: "AI has just arrived. 
How is it possible they're already losing jobs?"

And Sam Altman (right), OpenAI CEO had admitted last week, that the human element is still essential for most work. He had earlier brashly predicted humans may not be needed for jobs as soon as 2035. 

Now, he admits that this isn’t possible.