Cloudflare posted record revenue, then cut 20% of its workforce. CEO Matthew Prince says AI has made an entire category of workers obsolete

The prospect of AI-related layoffs has been the talk of Silicon Valley and Wall Street since Chat GPT launched its first AI model in late 2022. This year, a handful of tech companies are delivering on that promise. Cloudflare is one of the latest to do so. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince laid out his logic. The company is growing. Fast. It just posted record revenue growth and is expanding its global customer base. Still, Prince said the tech firm slashed 20% of its workforce earlier this month, with middle management facing the brunt of the cuts. “The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers,” he wrote. He defined “measurers” as those in middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition. Cloudflare is a San Francisco–headquartered connectivity cloud and internet security company with more than 5,000 employees as of 2025, operating on a hybrid model that combines remote and on-site work across 13 global offices. AI-related layoffs are becoming a staple of the tech world. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 40% of its workforce in February. Meta just this week cut 10% of workers, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned in a memo to employees that in the AI age, “success isn’t a given.” A recent report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas found that, in total, 49,135 layoffs in the U.S. have been tied to AI this year alone, nearly as many as all AI-related layoffs reported in 2025. But there’s a degree of suspicion among business leaders that at least some of these layoffs are the product of “AI-washing,” or reducing headcount for a reason unrelated to AI efficiencies but pinning it on the technology out of convenience. A handful of tech firms have cut back on bureaucratic bloat following the hiring craze at the end of the COVID pandemic. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen laid out that playbook in clear terms in a recent interview on the 20VC podcast. “Essentially, e