Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete, even as revenue hit a record high
Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete, even as revenue hit a record high
Cloudflare 表示 AI 已导致 1,100 个岗位被淘汰，尽管公司营收创下历史新高
Cloudflare on Thursday joined a growing list of tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — that have reported increased revenue alongside massive layoffs, attributing both trends to their use of AI. Cloudflare, which provides internet security and performance services to millions of websites worldwide, announced it was cutting its workforce by approximately 20%, which equates to 1,100 people, it said as part of its first quarter 2026 earnings report on Thursday.
周四，Cloudflare 加入了越来越多的科技公司行列（包括 Meta、微软和亚马逊），这些公司在报告营收增长的同时进行了大规模裁员，并将这两种趋势都归因于对人工智能的使用。Cloudflare 为全球数百万个网站提供互联网安全和性能服务，该公司在周四发布的 2026 年第一季度财报中宣布，将裁减约 20% 的员工，相当于 1,100 人。
“We’ve never done something like this in Cloudflare’s history,” co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said Thursday on the quarterly conference call, marking the first mass layoff in the company’s 16-year history. The company is cutting people from all teams and geographies except for salespeople who carry revenue quotas, CFO Thomas Seifert detailed on the call.
“在 Cloudflare 的历史上，我们从未做过这样的事情，”联合创始人兼首席执行官 Matthew Prince 在周四的季度电话会议上表示。这是该公司 16 年历史上首次大规模裁员。首席财务官 Thomas Seifert 在电话会议上详细说明，公司正在裁减除承担营收指标的销售人员之外，所有团队和地区的员工。
The news of the workforce cuts came as the company reported quarterly revenues of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase and the highest single quarter in the company’s history. However, this was coupled with a loss of $62.0 million compared with losing $53.2 million in the year-ago quarter. That widening loss, even as revenue surged, highlights a familiar paradox in Cloudflare’s story: The company is growing fast but has yet to turn a consistent profit.
裁员消息传出之际，该公司报告季度营收为 6.398 亿美元，同比增长 34%，创下公司历史上单季度最高纪录。然而，与此同时，公司亏损额达到 6,200 万美元，而去年同期亏损为 5,320 万美元。尽管营收激增，但亏损却在扩大，这凸显了 Cloudflare 故事中一个熟悉的悖论：公司发展迅速，但尚未实现持续盈利。
But the loss was a smaller percentage of revenue, and the quarter was coupled with a lot of other positive indicators. For instance, Cloudflare reported that it had over $2.5 billion in “remaining performance obligations,” a year-over-year growth of 34%. RPO is the favorite metric these days to indicate revenue under contract but not yet delivered. Hence, Prince insisted, the 20% cuts were not to reduce expenses but were strictly because of its use of AI.
不过，亏损占营收的比例有所下降，且该季度还有许多其他积极指标。例如，Cloudflare 报告称其拥有超过 25 亿美元的“剩余履约义务”（RPO），同比增长 34%。RPO 是目前衡量已签约但尚未交付营收的最受青睐指标。因此，Prince 坚称，20% 的裁员并非为了削减开支，而是完全出于对 AI 的使用。
“Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance; they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era,” Prince and Cloudflare co-founder and president, Michelle Zatlyn, wrote in a related blog post about the layoffs.
“今天的行动并非削减成本的举措，也不是对个人绩效的评估；而是关于 Cloudflare 如何定义一家世界级、高增长公司在智能体 AI（agentic AI）时代如何运营并创造价值，”Prince 和 Cloudflare 联合创始人兼总裁 Michelle Zatlyn 在一篇关于裁员的相关博客文章中写道。
Prince acknowledged on the call that even though Cloudflare has been selling AI-powered products, it was at first cautious about adopting AI itself. “Internally, the tipping point was last November. At that point, across our teams, we began to see massive productivity gains, team members that were two, 10, even 100 times more productive than they had been before. It was like going from a manual to an electric screwdriver,” he described. “Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone,” he added.
Prince 在电话会议上承认，尽管 Cloudflare 一直在销售 AI 驱动的产品，但起初对自身采用 AI 持谨慎态度。“在内部，转折点是去年 11 月。从那时起，我们各团队开始看到生产力的大幅提升，团队成员的效率比以前提高了 2 倍、10 倍甚至 100 倍。这就像从手动螺丝刀换成了电动螺丝刀，”他描述道。“仅在过去三个月里，Cloudflare 对 AI 的使用量就增加了 600% 以上，”他补充说。
Prince highlighted the internal use of AI coding, saying that virtually the entire R&D team is now using the company’s own Workers platform — a tool that lets developers build and run software directly on Cloudflare’s global network — including its vibe coding feature. He also noted that 100% of the code produced this way and deployed for use in Cloudflare’s products is “now reviewed by autonomous AI agents.”
Prince 强调了 AI 编程在内部的使用，称几乎整个研发团队现在都在使用公司自己的 Workers 平台（该工具允许开发人员直接在 Cloudflare 的全球网络上构建和运行软件），包括其“vibe coding”功能。他还指出，以这种方式生成并部署到 Cloudflare 产品中的代码，100%“现在都由自主 AI 智能体进行审查”。
But it’s not just developers who are using AI internally, he said. “Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done.” As a result, these highly productive, AI-powered employees require fewer support staff, he argued. “A lot of the support people that provide support behind them, those roles aren’t going to be the roles that, you know, drive companies going forward,” Prince said.
他说，不仅是开发人员在内部使用 AI。“公司各部门的员工，从工程到人力资源、财务再到市场营销，每天都会运行数千次 AI 智能体任务来完成工作。”他认为，因此，这些高效的、由 AI 驱动的员工所需的辅助人员更少了。“很多在他们身后提供支持的人员，这些角色将不再是未来推动公司发展的关键角色，”Prince 说。
Interestingly, Prince says that Cloudflare “will continue to hire people, and we’ll continue to invest in them because the people that are embracing these tools are just so much more productive than we’d ever seen before. I would guess that in 2027 we’ll have more employees than we did at any point in 2026.” Cloudflare said it ended its first quarter before layoffs with a headcount of about 5,500.
有趣的是，Prince 表示 Cloudflare “将继续招聘员工，并将继续投资于他们，因为那些拥抱这些工具的人比我们以往见过的任何人都更具生产力。我猜到 2027 年，我们的员工人数将超过 2026 年任何时候的水平。”Cloudflare 表示，在裁员前，其第一季度末的员工人数约为 5,500 人。
The pattern Prince described — deploying AI gains as justification for workforce reductions even during a period of strong revenue growth — is fast becoming a familiar script across the tech industry. Whether it reflects true structural transformation or acts as convenient cover for cost discipline is a question that investors and employees will be wrestling with for some time to come.
Prince 所描述的这种模式——即在营收强劲增长期间，利用 AI 带来的收益作为裁员的理由——正迅速成为整个科技行业熟悉的剧本。这究竟反映了真正的结构性转型，还是仅仅作为成本控制的便捷掩护，是投资者和员工在未来一段时间内都将纠结的问题。
When asked by an analyst on the call why the company needed to cut so deeply after such a good quarter, Prince said, “Just because you’re fit doesn’t mean you can’t get fitter.”
当电话会议上有分析师问及为何在如此出色的季度之后公司仍需进行如此大规模的裁员时，Prince 回答道：“仅仅因为你身体健康，并不意味着你不能变得更健康。”