Cloudflare's Q1 2026 report was, by conventional metrics, a success. Revenue hit a record. Earnings beat analyst expectations. Yet the announcement that accompanied those figures — 1,100 layoffs attributed to AI efficiency, representing roughly a fifth of the global workforce — produced a stock decline that erased far more value than the headcount savings could justify on any near-term model. The , who emphasized that agentic AI had made support roles obsolete, was the kind of language that has moved markets positively for two years.…