I genuinely did not see this coming. Cloudflare has been building one of the more coherent AI developer platforms out there–Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize, their edge inference stack–all sitting on top of the same network they’ve been quietly expanding for years. They’ve been making real moves in the agentic space, not just slapping an LLM API on top of existing products, and I thought they were doing it in a way that would require more people, not fewer.
And yet: 1,100 jobs gone–roughly 20% of their workforce–with the explanation being that internal AI adoption changed what the company actually needs. I can follow the logic even if I find the timing jarring. I have friends in the Lisbon office–one of their larger European engineering bases, and one of the better things to happen to the local tech scene in recent years–and I’m genuinely hoping they’re alright.