Square Outage Causes Payment Problem for Small Businesses

Square and CashApp, two payment platforms used by many small businesses, have been experiencing outages since Thursday. Users are reporting they have been unable to access their accounts or perform transactions on both payment platforms.

Both companies are owned by Block Inc. (formerly Square Inc.), a San Francisco-based technology company, co-founded by Jack Dorsey in 2009, which launched CashApp in 2013.

The outages continued into Friday morning before being resolved, the company said. CashApp and Square shared updates on their websites about the outages that affected thousands of customers, wherein accessing accounts, making payments, and viewing one’s dashboard was unavailable. As of Friday afternoon, CashApp said the issue is mostly fixed, but it will continue to investigate the situation.

“We’ve resolved a majority of the issues, but you may experience some delays,” CashApp wrote on Friday. “Our team continues to monitor the situation.”

As for Square, it gave a status update that all systems were functioning back to normal on Friday.

However, during the outages, some small businesses struggled to carry on amid the glitches.

Aaron Bergh, owner of Calwise Spirits Co. in Paso Robles, CA, told The San Francisco Chronicle that he was unable to process credit card payments, and had resorted to jotting down credit card details for later processing or accepting cash, limiting customer spending.

He also added that, unlike previous Square outages where he could at least record credit card information, this time he wasn’t even able to access his account.

“We’re taking a huge risk by letting product walk out the door with the possibility that their card may be declined when we try to process them,” he told the outlet.