CrowdStrike to cut 500 jobs, focus on ‘highest-impact opportunities’

The cybersecurity giant says it’s pursuing an initiative aimed at ‘doubling down’ on fast-growing areas

CrowdStrike disclosed that it will cut five per cent of its staff, or about 500 jobs, as part of a new effort aimed at “doubling down” on fast-growing areas.

In a regulatory filing Tuesday, the vendor said it’s pursuing a new “strategic plan” that will “evolve its operations to yield greater efficiencies.”

The cybersecurity giant included a letter from co-founder and CEO George Kurtz along with the US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which said the company will “continue to prudently hire, primarily in customer-facing and product engineering roles.”

“We’re operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs,” Kurtz wrote in the letter.

“To lead at scale, with nearly 10,000 CrowdStrikers and a clear path to $10bn in ARR, we are evolving how we operate. We’re building on what works, simplifying execution, and doubling down on our highest-impact opportunities.”

CRN has reached out to CrowdStrike for further comment.

The company said it expects financial results for its fiscal 2026 first quarter, ended April 30, to be “in-line with or above” prior guidance.

In the letter to staff, Kurtz said that CrowdStrike will be focusing especially on AI-related investments to “accelerate execution and efficiency.”

Meanwhile, in terms of key growth areas, CrowdStrike sees “multi-billion-dollar market opportunities in areas including NG-SIEM, identity, cloud, and exposure management,” he wrote. And “coupled with our Falcon Flex subscription model, we’re poised for continued growth,” Kurtz wrote in the letter.

Crucially, CrowdStrike is also looking at “expanding go-to-market and customer success capacity” through the new strategy, he wrote.

“As more organisations standardise on the Falcon platform, we’re scaling our go-to-market and customer success teams to deliver faster time-to-value and stronger outcomes for customers and partners, unlocking the full power of the platform,” Kurtz wrote.

While the global IT outage caused by the company’s faulty update in July 2024 was disruptive to air travel and many other industries, the impacts to CrowdStrike’s business appeared to be minimal in the months following, with the company consistently beating quarterly expectations.

In March, Kurtz told analysts that CrowdStrike had achieved a “comeback story” since the incident as the company exceeded Wall Street expectations for its most recent quarter.

This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.