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Square and Cash App suffered a recent outage.
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The outage caused inconvenience to customers, preventing purchases and financial losses for small businesses.
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A prolonged outage could have had devastating consequences for small businesses with narrow profit margins.
Square and Cash App, payment processing platforms under the ownership of Block, a leading software development firm known for its financial-focused applications, recently experienced an outage. This disruption caused inconvenience to customers, preventing them from making purchases, and incurred substantial financial losses for small business owners.
Square is a commonly used point-of-sale platform favored by storefronts seeking an affordable and streamlined payment processing solution. Conversely, Cash App is typically employed for electronic invoice payments and even employee wage disbursements.
The outage persisted for several hours throughout Thursday afternoon last week, and unfortunately, Block failed to adequately notify many of its users about the situation. While some customers did receive email alerts regarding the disruption, a considerable number were informed through a message posted on Square's X (formerly known as Twitter) account.
This message stated,
Since around noon PT on Thursday, sellers have been unable to access accounts or process payments due to a systems outage within Square. We know you trust us with your business, and these situations add challenges to running your operations. For that, we are truly sorry.
During this outage, numerous brick-and-mortar stores found themselves unable to carry out any transactions, leaving some to continue serving customers who could pay with cash. Others opted to close early, as the company did not provide a clear timeline for service restoration. The availability of offline services proved inconsistent, hampering companies in recording their transactions for future processing.
Both Square and Cash App are ideally suited for smaller businesses lacking dedicated accounting resources. However, in the wake of this outage, many are likely to explore alternative systems, even if they lack the convenience of a mobile app. If a prolonged outage of Square and Cash App had occurred, this could have had devastating consequences for small businesses operating with narrow margins.