- Jack Dorsey told Block staff they were being laid off in an all-lowercase email on Tuesday
Block, the Bay Area tech giant behind Square, Cash App and Afterpay, is abruptly laying off 931 workers, according to an email from CEO Jack Dorsey to workers on Tuesday. More than 200 of the employees worked in California, Sfsafe reports.
Dorsey, who co-founded and led Twitter before co-founding the financial tech juggernaut, wrote in his all-lowercase note that Block would be cutting 80 managers, 391 workers from teams that are “off strategy” and 460 workers who were said to be underperforming. The cuts arrived suddenly, but that’s as Dorsey prefers it; Business Insider reported in 2023 that the CEO decided to eliminate drawn-out performance improvement plans in favor of cutting underachieving workers “without delay.”
Dorsey’s Tuesday layoff email was first reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by SFGATE and the Guardian. Oakland-headquartered Block did not respond to requests for comment. Per the company’s reported headcount of 11,372 from December, the cut amounts to about 8% of its workforce. In November 2023, Block announced a headcount cap of 12,000 employees.
The company also filed a WARN notice with California officials, as is generally required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act in the event of mass layoffs. The previously unreported document says that 240 employees who work remotely throughout California received notice of their layoffs on Tuesday and listed the cuts by role. The layoff hit software engineers hard but also included workers in human resources, product, legal, recruitment, marketing, design and compliance.
Dorsey finished his Tuesday email’s introductory paragraph by writing: “i want to give you all the straight facts.”
He then explained the three layoff categories — “strategy,” “performance” and “hierarchy” — noting that along with the 80 manager layoffs, 193 managers would be moved to individual contributor roles.
“none of the above are trying to hit a specific financial target, replacing folks with AI, or changing our headcount cap,” Dorsey wrote, adding that the cuts are about strategy goals, “acting faster on performance” and “flattening our org.” (SFGATE has reported on the trend of companies cutting staff to boost spending toward artificial intelligence projects.)
He also wrote that Block is closing hundreds of job openings, writing that of the 748 that had been open, only a few categories would remain, including hiring for key leadership roles and for roles that had already reached the “offer stage.”
Dorsey seemed to acknowledge the suddenness of the large layoff, writing, “why do this all at once instead of over time? we’re behind in our actions, and that’s not fair to the individual or to the company.”
He called laying off staff “the toughest part” of his job but noted that it’s his job to increase the company’s value — and thus the value of the equity that workers hold. Dorsey wrote that he believes the cuts will “help us focus and execute better” to push up that valuation. Block’s stock price slumped in February due to a worse-than-expected earnings report; as of Wednesday afternoon, the company was worth about $37 billion.
Laid-off Block workers flooded onto LinkedIn on Tuesday, with many posts expressing sadness and including pleas for help finding new work.
