Block, the financial technology company that operates Cash App, Tidal and Afterpay, is laying off about 10% of its Atlanta-area workforce.
According to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice sent to the state, 49 employees out of 474 assigned to the company’s Atlanta office on North Avenue will be let go by mid-May. Employers must file WARN notices ahead of major layoffs or plant closings. Impacted roles include software engineers, recruiters, compliance analysts and project managers, among several others.
Representatives for Block did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The layoffs 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 open roles at the company, with the exception of key leadership and critical operation roles, as well as those that have progressed to an offer stage.
Block, formerly known as Square, was co-founded in 2008 by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. The company provides mobile payments services, point-of-sale hardware and software. Its portfolio also includes Square, which allows businesses to accept card payments and manage business operations; Tidal, a music streaming service; and bitcoin service Bitkey. Dorsey serves as CEO and chairman. The company has had a footprint in Atlanta for more than a decade.
The company’s Square and Cash App platforms have millions of users. According to the company’s most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, about 4 million sellers used Square in 2024 to make 5.2 billion sales transactions. Cash App had 57 million monthly transacting activities in December, up 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. Shares are down, however, 34% year over year.
In the email obtained by TechCrunch, written entirely in lowercase, Dorsey denied the layoffs are designed to “hit a specific financial target” or to replace employees with artificial intelligence. 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.”
© American Military News
