Block, the economic engineering company that operates , Cash App, Tidal and Afterpay, is laying off about 10 % of its , Atlanta-area labor.
According to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice sent to the position, 49 people out of 474 assigned to the business ‘s , Atlanta , business on , North Avenue , will be let go by mid-May. Employers must document WARN observes ahead of significant layoffs or grow closings. Disrupted roles include software engineers, managers, conformity analysts and project supervisors, among several others.
Reps for Block did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The cuts are not just confined to , Atlanta. Companywide, Block is laying off 931 people, or roughly 8 % of its workforce, according to an , internal email obtained by TechCrunch. It is also closing more than 700 available jobs at the business, with the exception of essential leadership and important operation functions, as well as those that have progressed to an offer period.
Block, previously known as Square, was co-founded in 2008 by , Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. The organization provides mobile payments service, point-of-sale hardware and software. Its collection also includes Square, which allows companies to accept cards payments and manage enterprise procedures, Tidal, a music streaming service, and cryptocurrency company Bitkey. Dorsey serves as CEO and chairman. The business has had a footprints in , Atlanta , for more than a decade.
The agency’s Square and , Cash App , websites have millions of users. According to the company’s most recent monthly submitting with the , Securities and Exchange Commission, about 4 million dealers used Square in 2024 to create 5.2 billion sales purchases.  , Cash App , had 57 million regular trading activities in December, away by 1 million year over year.
The company ended 2024 with$ 2.8 billion in net income, up from$ 9.7 million in 2023, according to its filing. Much of this increase was because of a one-time deferred tax benefit of$ 1.9 billion. Stocks are over, however, 34 % year over year.
In the internet obtained by TechCrunch, written entirely in letter, Dorsey denied the cuts are designed to “hit a certain financial goal” or to replace workers with artificial knowledge. Instead, they are specific to the company’s needs “around strategy”, he wrote. The layoffs flatten the organization so it can “move faster and with less abstraction”.
” We need to move to help us meet and stay ahead of the transformational moment our industry is in”, Dorsey wrote.
In the email, Dorsey said the company is cutting 460 people for performance reasons. This includes employees scoring a “below” rating on the company’s internal performance tracking metrics. Some 391 people are being cut for” strategy” reasons — that is, reducing from teams that are off-strategy and fixing our “discipline ratios”. The company has also laid off 80 managers, with 193 moving to individual contributor roles.
This is not the first round of layoffs to impact Block ‘s , Atlanta , workforce. In , January 2024, 27 roles were eliminated, including the head of global communications for Tidal and the head of product design for the company’s financial services division, according to another WARN notice. Companywide, Block cut about 1, 000 roles at that time.
In the email, Dorsey wrote that this is the toughest part of his job.
” We must have a very high bar of correctness for us to take any action, which takes iteration and time to get right”, Dorsey wrote. ” I always balance this with the fact that everyone here, and those that are departing, has equity in our company. It’s my job to increase that value. We believe this will help us focus and execute better to do just that”.
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