The 2026 Tech Layoff Wave Is Not Over After SentinelOne and Wix Job Cuts

The short answer is no. When SentinelOne told investors on May 28 that it would cut roughly 8 percent of its workforce, as reported by CNBC, it became the latest name in a 2026 tech layoff wave that has only gathered speed. This is not a story about one struggling company. It is a story about an industry restructuring itself around artificial intelligence even as revenue climbs. At Metaintro, we have tracked this wave company by company, and the pattern is unmistakable. The cuts are spreading from website builders to cybersecurity firms to tax software giants, and the through-line is rarely weak demand. It is a deliberate reshaping of how software companies staff themselves.

If you are a tech worker reading the headlines and feeling uneasy, that instinct is sound. The companies announcing these cuts are not the ones missing payroll. SentinelOne grew revenue 21 percent year over year in the same quarter it announced layoffs. Cloudflare posted record revenue weeks before cutting roughly a fifth of its staff. This is the defining and most unsettling feature of the 2026 wave. Profitable, growing companies are still cutting, which means the old signals job seekers relied on, things like strong earnings and rising stock prices, no longer tell you whether your role is safe.

What did SentinelOne actually announce?

SentinelOne, the cybersecurity company behind the Singularity platform, told investors on May 28 that it would reduce its full-time workforce by approximately 8 percent. The company expects to incur a one-time charge of nearly 25 million dollars tied to the restructuring, of which roughly 15 million is cash-based. As of January 2026, SentinelOne employed more than 2,900 people, which puts the cut in the range of a couple hundred roles.

What makes the announcement notable is the financial backdrop. SentinelOne reported revenue of 276.7 million dollars for the quarter ended April 30, 2026, up 21 percent from a year earlier, with annualized recurring revenue crossing 1.16 billion dollars. By most historical measures, that is a healthy business. Yet the company also issued a softer-than-expected forecast for the coming quarter and missed some analyst revenue estimates, and the stock fell sharply in extended trading. Management framed the cuts as a way to redirect spending toward growth areas including AI, data, and cloud. In other words, the company is not shrinking because it is failing. It is reallocating people to bet on a different future.

That framing should sound familiar if you read our coverage of the broader wave. The SentinelOne cut is one data point, and on its own it could be dismissed as a single company tightening its belt. The reason it matters is what surrounds it.

Is the SentinelOne cut part of a bigger pattern?

It is, and the timing is striking. On the same day SentinelOne announced its restructuring, Wix told its entire staff that it would cut about 20 percent of its workforce, roughly 1,000 jobs, in the largest layoff in the company's history. We covered the details in our breakdown of how Wix is cutting 20 percent of its workforce in a 2026 AI restructuring, but the headline is that Wix CEO and co-founder Avishai Abrahami blamed two forces at once. The Israeli shekel has gained more than 20 percent against the dollar over the past year, reaching a 33-year high and making the company's largely Israeli workforce expensive in dollar terms. At the same time, Abrahami pointed to a fundamental shift in how software companies must operate in the age of AI. Wix employed 5,277 people at the end of March 2026 and expects to settle near 4,200 once the cuts are complete.

Rewind a week and the pattern only deepens. On May 20, Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, eliminated about 3,000 positions, roughly 17 percent of its global workforce, in a restructuring CEO Sasan Goodarzi tied explicitly to simplifying the company and accelerating its AI efforts. We unpacked that move in our look at Intuit's 3,000 job cuts and the 2026 tech layoff playbook. Like SentinelOne, Intuit was not in distress. It raised its full-year outlook and confirmed its quarterly dividend in the same breath as the cuts, while booking an estimated 300 to 340 million dollars in restructuring charges.

And before any of that, Cloudflare set the template. On May 7, alongside record quarterly revenue of 639.8 million dollars, up 34 percent year over year, CEO Matthew Prince announced the elimination of roughly 1,100 jobs, about 20 percent of the workforce. Our piece on Cloudflare's 20 percent layoffs and the AI measurers explains Prince's now-infamous framework. Borrowing from Peter Drucker, he sorted his staff into builders, sellers, and measurers, and aimed the cuts squarely at measurers in finance, compliance, legal review, and middle management, the roles he believes AI can now absorb. Four growing companies, four large cuts, all within a single month, all pointing at the same culprit.

How big is the 2026 tech layoff wave overall?

The individual numbers are sobering on their own, but the aggregate is what tells the real story. According to the widely cited tracker Layoffs.fyi, more than 165,000 tech employees have been laid off across over 1,000 companies so far in 2026. That is not a tally of failing startups. The list is dominated by profitable, publicly traded firms that are using strength, not weakness, as the moment to restructure.

The wave is not confined to Silicon Valley software either. On May 28, Morgan Stanley analysts doubled their forecast for AI-driven job losses in European banking, estimating that lenders could cut as much as 20 percent of roles, around 400,000 jobs, by 2030. That was up from a 10 percent, roughly 200,000-job projection the bank published in January. We covered that forecast in our analysis of why European banks may cut 20 percent of jobs to AI by 2030. It is worth being precise here. The Morgan Stanley figure is a forecast, not a count of jobs already gone, and much of any reduction would come through voluntary departures and retirements rather than mass layoffs. But the direction of travel is the same one driving SentinelOne, Wix, Intuit, and Cloudflare.

When you stack a same-day SentinelOne and Wix announcement on top of Intuit eight days earlier, Cloudflare three weeks earlier, and a doubled banking forecast in the same week, the idea that the wave is winding down does not survive contact with the calendar. If anything, it is broadening from a tech-sector story into an economy-wide one.

Why are profitable companies still cutting jobs?

This is the question that should reframe how you think about job security in 2026. In previous downturns, layoffs followed losses. A company missed earnings, demand softened, and headcount fell as a survival measure. The 2026 wave breaks that link. SentinelOne, Cloudflare, and Intuit all cut while growing and, in two cases, while raising their outlooks.

The reason is a bet on AI productivity. Executives increasingly believe that AI tools let them deliver more output with fewer people, especially in support functions. Cloudflare's Prince was unusually blunt about it, protecting builders and sellers while targeting the measurers he sees as automatable. Intuit's Goodarzi tied the cuts to simplifying the company and feeding specialized data into AI partnerships. SentinelOne reframed the cut as a reallocation toward AI, data, and cloud. The common thread is that companies are not cutting because the work disappeared. They are cutting because they believe the work can now be done differently.

We have written about both the panic and the nuance here, because the truth sits between extremes. Our reality check on the 2026 AI jobs panic argues against doom-spiraling, and our look at why AI does not have to mean layoffs for your job shows where human judgment still wins. But it would be dishonest to pretend nothing is changing. The more sober framing, which we explore in our piece on the AI workforce skills mismatch, is that this is less a job apocalypse and more a violent reshuffling of which skills companies will pay for.

Which roles are most exposed, and which are safer?

The Cloudflare framework is the clearest public map we have. Prince's measurers, the people in finance operations, compliance, legal review, reporting, and layers of middle management, are the most directly targeted. These are roles where the output is structured, repeatable, and increasingly legible to AI systems. Intuit's cuts to corporate structure echo the same logic, trimming coordination and overhead roles rather than core product engineering. We have also tracked how this plays out beyond tech in our reporting on how AI is erasing back-office jobs in Phoenix and on the executive assistant role vanishing as admin work gets automated.

On the other side, builders and sellers have so far been treated as protected, even expanded. Prince said that if an engineer can be ten times as productive, he wants to hire as many as he can find. That does not mean engineering is untouchable, and we have written about the hidden risk that AI deskills careers even when it does not eliminate them, and about how the software engineer title itself is shifting as AI absorbs routine coding. But the near-term signal is consistent. Roles that generate revenue or build product are being reinforced. Roles that measure, coordinate, and administer are being thinned. If your job sits in the second category, this is the moment to take that signal seriously rather than wait for it to reach your desk.

It is also worth naming a quieter problem in this market. As layoffs rise, so do ghost jobs, listings that companies post without any real intent to hire. We dug into how ghost jobs are breaking the 2026 hiring market, and the practical takeaway is that a flood of openings does not necessarily mean a flood of opportunities. Job seekers need to read the market more skeptically than the raw posting counts suggest.

What does this mean for your career, and how should tech workers respond?

If you take one thing from this wave, let it be this. Stability is no longer something you can read off your employer's earnings report. The companies cutting hardest in 2026 are often the ones posting record numbers, which means the safest assumption is that no role is automatically protected by company health alone. That sounds bleak, but it is actually clarifying, because it tells you where to put your energy.

First, audit your own role against the builder-seller-measurer lens. If most of your day is spent measuring, reporting, coordinating, or administering, you are closer to the cut line than you would like, and the smart move is to push your work toward judgment, building, or direct revenue impact. Second, treat AI fluency as a baseline skill rather than a specialty. The workers who are thriving are the ones using these tools to multiply their output, not the ones avoiding them. Our guide to how AI certifications can boost salary and career growth in 2026 is a concrete starting point, and our coverage of why HR leaders are betting on worker training shows that employers themselves expect retraining, not just replacement.

Third, build your safety net before you need it. If you are currently employed, that means keeping your resume current, your network warm, and your skills mapped to where hiring is actually happening rather than where it used to be. If you have already been affected by a layoff, know that you are in very large company this year, and that being cut from a growing company carries no stigma, it is a structural shift, not a personal verdict. It also helps to read the macro picture clearly, and our look at how US jobless claims tick up while layoffs stay near historic lows is a reminder that the broader labor market is more mixed than the tech headlines alone suggest. Our broader framework on how the 2026 tech layoff wave ends and how workers can thrive lays out the longer arc, and the honest version is that this reshuffling will create new roles even as it eliminates old ones. The question is whether you position yourself for the roles being created rather than clinging to the ones being phased out.

The wave is not over. SentinelOne and Wix on the same day, Intuit and Cloudflare in the same month, and a doubled banking forecast in the same week all say the same thing. The restructuring of work around AI is still accelerating, and the workers who treat 2026 as a moment to adapt rather than wait will be the ones who come out ahead.

Related Articles

• How the 2026 tech layoff wave ends and how workers can thrive
• Wix cuts 20 percent of its workforce in a 2026 AI restructuring
• Intuit's 3,000 job cuts and the 2026 tech layoff playbook
• Cloudflare's 20 percent layoffs and the AI measurers
• European banks may cut 20 percent of jobs to AI by 2030
• Reality check on the 2026 AI jobs panic
• Why AI does not have to mean layoffs for your job
• The AI workforce skills mismatch, not a job apocalypse
• The software engineer title is fading as AI creates more jobs
• Ghost jobs are breaking the 2026 hiring market
• AI certifications boost salary and career growth in 2026
• Why HR leaders are betting on worker training in 2026

People Also Asked

Q: Is the 2026 tech layoff wave over?

A: No. SentinelOne and Wix both announced cuts on May 28, just over a week after Intuit eliminated about 3,000 roles and three weeks after Cloudflare cut roughly 1,100. With more than 165,000 tech jobs cut across over 1,000 companies in 2026 according to Layoffs.fyi, and Morgan Stanley doubling its forecast for AI-driven banking cuts, the wave is broadening rather than winding down.

Q: Why are profitable tech companies still laying off workers in 2026?

A: Because the 2026 cuts are driven by bets on AI productivity rather than weak demand. SentinelOne grew revenue 21 percent, Cloudflare posted record revenue up 34 percent, and Intuit raised its outlook, all while cutting. Executives believe AI tools let them deliver more output with fewer people, especially in support, finance, and compliance roles.

Q: Which tech jobs are most at risk from AI in 2026?

A: Based on Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's public framework, the most exposed roles are measurers, meaning finance operations, compliance, legal review, reporting, and middle management, where output is structured and repeatable. Builders such as engineers and revenue-generating sellers have so far been treated as protected, though even engineering roles are shifting as AI absorbs routine work.

Looking for your next opportunity after a layoff? You are not alone, and you do not have to navigate this market by yourself. Metaintro tracks every major hire and job cut so you always know where the opportunities are moving next. Sign up here to get matched with roles that fit where the market is actually growing.