Inside the Rolling Layoffs at Jack Dorsey’s Block

After hundreds workers were laid off in early February of Jack Dorsey's Blocksome of those left at the company say the internal culture has shifted to a point where performance anxiety is rampant, with the help of generative AI is necessary, and the general morale deteriorates rapidly. Block is the parent company behind the merchant payment processor Square and the payment app Cash App. Dorsey founded the company in 2009 after previously co-founding it Twitter.

“Morale is probably the worst I've felt in four years,” reads an employee complaint filed with Dorsey in a recent all-hands meeting, a transcript of which was seen by WIRED. “The overarching culture at Block is crumbling.” WIRED spoke to seven current and former Block employees, who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal operations at the company. A spokesman for Block did not respond to requests for comment.

The layoffs at Block began this month and could eventually affect up to 10 percent of the company's workforce, according to reporting by Bloomberg. Before the downsizing began, Block had around 11,000 people on staff. Rather than a one-time event, management has been phasing out the firing over the course of weeks, telling employees the process will continue until the end of this month, sources tell WIRED.

“We still don't know if our livelihoods will be affected, and this makes it incredibly difficult to make big life choices without knowing if we'll still have a job next week,” says another employee complaint from the same meeting with Dorsey.

Multiple sources who spoke to WIRED say they were shocked when Arnaud Weber, Block's engineering lead, a email after the initial wave of layoffs characterize them as performance-related rather than a cost-cutting measure. The sources say they disagree with management's internal messages about the earnings-based earnings.

“As part of our 2025 performance cycle, we have parted ways with teammates who did not meet the expectations of their role,” Weber wrote in the email, which was reviewed by WIRED. “These departures were based on clear performance expectations, role expectations and alignment that come from calibrations at the bar for each level.”

Block employees are currently expected to send an update email to Dorsey every week, who then uses generative AI to summarize the thousands of messages. In the same all-hands meeting, which took place after hundreds of staff had already been laid off, Dorsey said frequent topics cited by workers in their latest posts were “widespread concerns about layoffs,” “performance anxiety,” and “the tension between accelerating delivery through AI adoption versus maintaining code quality and engineering rigor.”

During the meeting, Dorsey reiterated that the layoffs were made for performance reasons, saying there was “a significant portion of our population that dialed it in.” He also stressed that the remaining workers should use generative AI tools to maximize productivityor else Block would risk being overtaken by his competitors.

“Top-down mandates to use big language models are crazy,” says a current Block employee. “If the tool was good, we'd all just use it.”