A Canadian software developer picked up his phone at around 7:30 a.m. on May 27, saw a series of terrified texts from colleagues, and attempted to log into Slack. He was unable to. The screen remained locked. The previous evening, there had been no warning. No management clues, no all-hands meeting, and no polite warning from HR. There was only silence, followed by a locked laptop that provided him with all the information he required before any email could.
He wrote on LinkedIn, directly tagging Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, “Rumor has it we’ve been laid off, but I don’t have an email or any message to confirm anything.” “Do I have a job?” he asked, tagging his manager in the same post. This is the kind of question that shouldn’t need to be posed in public. The fact that it was and that thousands of people knew exactly what it meant right away says something unsettling about the state of the industry.
At around seven in the morning, Webflow employees were locked out of their laptops without prior notice. A few minutes prior to severance details being sent to personal email addresses, the company subsequently clarified that this was a security measure—standard procedure to protect customer data. Whether or not your laptop was among those that went dark will likely determine whether that explanation is accepted as plausible or a euphemism for inadequate preparation. The entire number of impacted workers has not been made public, and the company’s handling of access shutdowns and notifications was immediately criticized.
According to an anonymous developer who spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle, the extent of the layoffs was “a bloodbath,” and more people lost their jobs this time than in Webflow’s previous round of layoffs, which impacted 8% of its workforce back in 2024. The company, which started out as a no-code website builder in 2012 and was valued at $4 billion in 2022, employs between 500 and 1,000 people, though the precise number has never been verified. Although Webflow’s official statement only used the word “many,” an estimate based on previous layoff patterns and current headcount data suggests that about 140 jobs were cut.
All of this was framed around AI by CEO Linda Tong. Instead of acknowledging the human cost, her blog post titled “Evolving Webflow for the Agentic Web,” which was published that same morning, read more like a strategic memo. “AI is rewriting the rules for how marketing teams create, test, and optimize digital experiences,” she said. “And the companies that move decisively through moments like this are the ones that come out ahead.” Depending on whether you are still employed or not, this sentence likely sounds very different.
The pattern that keeps happening is more startling than the layoffs themselves—businesses fire employees, particularly in volatile markets. Webflow’s predicament emerged in the same week that ClickUp fired 22% of its employees and Wix laid off about 20% of its workforce, both of which cited AI-driven restructuring. Similar to how “strategic realignment” was used ten years ago, “AI pivot” seems to have emerged as the new all-purpose rationale in press releases. Acrisure announced 2,250 layoffs that same week, while Intuit confirmed 3,000, citing AI partnerships as the primary justification. So far in 2026, about 150,000 tech jobs have been eliminated. Every week, the number increases.
Speaking to reporters, the former Webflow developer didn’t agree with the reasoning behind the AI replacement. “C-suite thinks that I’m being replaced by AI, but they don’t actually understand what AI is doing,” he stated. “They’re going to find out at some point that they haven’t actually replaced anything, all they’ve done is make a mess.” That claim is worth sitting with even though it cannot be independently verified. Executives announcing strategy pivots from keynote stages frequently have a different perspective on AI’s true capabilities than do those closest to the technical work.
16 weeks of base pay, an extra week for each year of service, and six months of COBRA health coverage were provided to affected employees. By industry standards, that package is fairly generous. Regardless of the severance math, the Canadian developer who was on a closed work permit and had publicly mentioned the relocation consequences a lockout without notice would have for his family probably also received some form of that support, but the circumstances surrounding his discovery made the entire situation feel needlessly cruel.
As this develops, it’s difficult to avoid thinking that the true question isn’t whether AI is altering the process of creating websites. Of course it is. The question is whether a company that once promoted its people-first culture is the most honest when it comes to mass layoffs delivered via laptop lockout and a CEO’s morning blog post. This was Webflow’s second round of layoffs under Tong’s leadership and in less than two years. There might be a real AI turning point. Companies have a choice in how they handle it: quickly, discreetly, and before the majority of workers have finished their first cup of coffee.
