GitLab cuts 14% of staff as it scales its platform to serve AI workloads

Key points

• Developer platform GitLab has laid off about 14% of its workforce, about 350 employees, as part of a broader restructuring effort it detailed last month.
• The company said in May that it was going to reduce its workforce as it exited 22 countries, flattened management layers, and invested in infrastructure to scale its platform and serve increased traffic from AI workflows, with a sharper focus on research and development.
• CEO Bill Staples said during a conference call on Tuesday that agentic workloads are stressing developer infrastructure more than it was designed to handle.
• It isn’t a problem unique to GitLab.
• The company’s rival GitHub has itself struggled to deal with a massive influx of AI-powered submissions that have affected its uptime.