The steady march of Bay Area job losses to AI continues today with SF-based tech company Cloudflare, which says it is laying off 1,100 employees globally.

Website optimization and security company Cloudflare, which works to speed up the performance of web-based properties and mitigate against malicious attacks, announced that it is laying off 1,100 employees on Thursday, with notices going out as we speak.

The reason, like with most recent layoff announcements in the tech sphere, is the rise of AI and the need for the organization to rethink how it does business.

"Today is a hard day," the company said in an internal memo obtained by Business Insider. "This decision unfortunately means saying goodbye to teammates who have contributed meaningfully to our mission and to building Cloudflare into one of the world's most successful companies. We want to be clear that this decision is not a reflection of the individual work or talent of those leaving us. Instead, we are reimagining every internal process, team, and role across the company."

The company says in the memo that its internal use of AI has surged "more than 600% in the last three months alone" across multiple departments, and "That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era."

The company just delivered its first-quarter earnings for investors, which beat Wall Street expectations, and the memo insists that the layoffs are not "a cost-cutting measure."

As Reuters reports, Cloudflare had around 5,150 employees as of today, so this represents a headcount reduction of around 20%.

This layoff announcement follows a similar one made by Coinbase on Tuesday, and continues the trend predicted across the tech world in recent months, thanks to the rapidly increasing capabilities of AI models.

Meta also has plans to cut its workforce by around 16,000 this year, with half of those layoffs announced two weeks ago.

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