Alyssa Henry, the CEO of San Francisco-based Square, will step down from her position on Oct. 2, according to a regulatory filing. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who now heads Block, Square’s parent company, plans to step in as the head of the point-of-sale system company.
Henry has worked at Block, which also has other companies including Cash App and Afterpay under its umbrella, for more than nine years. The reason for her departure remains unclear.
“As CEO of Square, Alyssa Henry helped transform the business into a software-led technology company, guided the team during the uncertainty of global pandemic lockdowns, and expanded our breadth of services for small businesses around the world,” read a statement Square provided to SFGATE. “Square is what it is today in large part because of Alyssa’s leadership and we wish her the best in her future endeavors.”
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This news comes less than two weeks after a nationwide outage of Square that left thousands of businesses unable to accept credit card payments from customers for nearly a whole day. San Francisco restaurant Gumbo Social shared on Instagram that it had to “turn away over 50 guests” the day of the outage, dealing it a significant loss in revenue. Oakland pizzeria Leaning Tower closed for the day due to the outage.
Square later explained the outage in a post on its website, saying that there was no evidence of a cybersecurity event.
“While making several standard changes to our internal network software, the combination of updates prevented our systems from properly communicating with each other, and ultimately caused the disruption,” the Square post said. “The issue also affected many of our internal tools for troubleshooting and support, making them temporarily unavailable.”