Service Outage on 16 Mar 2017

Brewerks · ‎03-17-2017

With regards to the service outage of more than an hour yesterday (16 Mar 2017) during business hours in USA, it seemed like Square is taking it lightly with just a simple "I am so sorry" reply with absolutely no apology email or compensation after the fact ... does anyone not take any offense to this respond from Square even though your business were affected and the business you lost because your customers did not have cash on hand? I am curious because I lost about $100 during my lunch hour business as I was logged out of the Square application, couldn't sign back on for offline transactions and my customers did not have cash with them. $100 might not seem like a lot to Square or to a lot of companies but for a small business in a small city, that is equivalent to a one day's pay for an employee.

Caty · ‎03-17-2017

Hey there - Thanks so much for your post.

It's definitely not our intention to come off as flippant, and I'm sorry that's the way that our initial response came off to you. We know that not being able to take a card payment is massively disruptive your businesses, and all of our teams work very hard to ensure that you can do that at any time of day. Most days we're successful in that mission. Yesterday we weren't, and for that we're truly sorry.

We're in process of an apology email, which should go out tomorrow. I'm personally working on it, along with a few others. Yesterday's focus was on: A) fully restoring services/ understanding the root cause, and B) responding to all of the inbound questions we received during the time we were out. We opted to hold off on sending something proactively until we had full context around what had happened, as we wanted to be able to explain it to you all. We'll also be posting a full breakdown of what happened on our status page, issquareup.com, too.

Hope that provides some context into our response. Thanks again for sticking with us.

bossladi · ‎03-19-2017

Do you know if that affected Fridays Business? In reference to sales and deposits? Is square behind? My deposits were from paid invoices. Just says pending. That has never happened.

Spenser · ‎03-19-2017

I'm sorry to hear you were also impacted by the outage, @WAPOTACOTX. We recently sent a followup email to the businesses that were impacted, so hopefully you received that for more info too.

In any case, we'd more than happy to discuss the impact to your business and what we can do to help. We can't look into account specifics here, so contact our Support team directly and we can discuss your account with you.

Likewise, @bossladi, your deposits should not have been impacted by the outage so if something is amiss on your account please contact us when you can!

WAPOTACOTX · ‎03-19-2017

@Spenser the problem there is that I have called a few times on Thursday and Friday and no one answers. It says to leave a call back number and you guys never called back. This is the email you guys sent

"We’re writing to say we’re sorry. Square experienced an outage yesterday, which likely had an impact on your business. We’ve resolved the issue, and if you’re interested, you can read about the details of the outage

We recommend you visit your Transaction Status report to double-check that all payments you took were completed, and, if any were not, you can follow the steps outlined in our Support Center to charge or cancel them.

Again, we sincerely apologize to you and your customers. We know you depend on us to serve your business, and we take disruptions like this very seriously. You can rest assured the problem has been solved—and thank you, as always, for using Square.

The Square Team."

What we want to see and hear about is how are y'all going to resolve the issue and problems y'all had.

WAPOTACOTX · ‎03-19-2017

I have a restaurant and we use the square POS. Same thing happend to us where people didnt have cash to pay. It was at prime Lunch hour and my restaurant was at about 90% of its capacity and our delivery driver were really busy when this outage occured. So is square not doing anything to help out the small businesses that were affected by this situation? We also stopped serving until the system was up in running. If there is no solution to this problem I might be forced to switch POS systems. I need to know ASAP.

VanKalkerFarms · ‎03-17-2017

https://www.issquareup.com

You can read more at the above link. After finding and fixing the error they are in the process of reviewing the error that took place, seeing how to make sure it doesn't happen again, and what to do to fix other issues from happening. They should have something up today or tomorrow.

As a side note things like this are good learning experiences. It is always a good idea to have backup plans in place for your company, I have Paypal installed on all machines just in case something like this ever happened at least I would be able to take payments while writing down transactions on paper.

Bob Van Kalker
My Van Kalker Farms Garden Center website
My Rise'n Roll Bakery Schererville Indiana Facebook Page
My Rise'n Roll Bakery Cedar Lake Facebook Page

Brewerks · ‎03-18-2017

Thanks VanKalkerFrams, your recommendation is spot on. Just installed paypal and in the process of getting paypal credit card swipe gadget.

sciabica1936 · ‎03-18-2017

I did the same thing during the outage – added PayPal Here as a backup. Interestingly, using it for 1 hour made me realize how great Square is LOL. It'll be good as a backup, but there's no web interface for items, no way to import/export CSVs, hook up to a USB barcode scanner, and separate sales by location or device.

Spenser · ‎03-19-2017

I'm sorry you weren't able to get a hold of us last week; unfortunately the outage impacted some of our support channels as well, including phone support.

"What we want to see and hear about is how are y'all going to resolve the issue and problems y'all had."

In addition to the timeline on issquareup.com that VanKalkerFarms linked above, you can also check out our engineering team's Incident Review, including their action items following the outage. Hopefully that provides some helpful context in the meantime, but feel free to give us a call this week and we'd be happy to discuss it further.