Outage At Square Prevents Small Businesses From Accepting Credit Cards (sfchronicle.com) 40
The financial services platform Square is experiencing a widespread outage, causing many small businesses around the country to switch to cash only. From a report: In a statement posted to their website, Square said it began investigating a service disruption linked to its data center at 11:47 a.m. As of 4:48 p.m., the San Francisco-based company said it was still working on a fix. Aaron Bergh, owner of Calwise Spirits Co. in Paso Robles, said he noticed the disruption around noon. In the three hours following, his business did about $1,000 in sales -- all without being able to process credit card payments.
Instead employees have been writing down credit card numbers to charge later or done business in cash, which has limited how much customers can spend, he said. In the five years he's been doing business, Bergh said he'd never experienced a Square outage lasting more than half-an-hour. Even in those cases, the platform would still allow businesses to record credit card information. This time, he can't even log into his account, he said. Square is posting updates at issquareup.com.
Instead employees have been writing down credit card numbers to charge later or done business in cash, which has limited how much customers can spend, he said. In the five years he's been doing business, Bergh said he'd never experienced a Square outage lasting more than half-an-hour. Even in those cases, the platform would still allow businesses to record credit card information. This time, he can't even log into his account, he said. Square is posting updates at issquareup.com.
Wow, 15 hours and counting (Score:2)
Tomorrow's Friday - if they don't get it fixed soon, a lot of restaurant workers are gonna be pretty miserable.
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I tried getting dinner from two local restaurants last night and they couldn't do anything because of this. They weren't even able to serve me if I came in person and paid cash. It was very disappointing to resort to a national chain to get some sub-par sandwiches.
It seems like using square is like a deal with the devil. It's great until it isn't.
Re:Wow, 15 hours and counting (Score:4, Informative)
The federal government has done nothing to create, much less force the use of, a cashless economy.
Credit card companies, on the other hand, have been trying to find ways to channel every purchase through them so that they can take a cut. They've been very successful so far.
Put the blame where it belongs.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The federal government has done nothing to create, much less force the use of, a cashless economy.
Credit card companies, on the other hand, have been trying to find ways to channel every purchase through them so that they can take a cut. They've been very successful so far.
Put the blame where it belongs.
100 times this.
It's Visa/Mastercard/et al. that want to see an end to cash because cash represents the lowest possible cost in accepting payment.
That's why they charge the merchant for accepting the payment whilst trying to entice you into using your card. They've made it de facto illegal to have a higher price for accepting card (in some countries, literally illegal). If people knew how much of their purchase price was being eaten by the card purveyors, they'd spend a lot more cash.
Visa/MC/et al.
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Thank you for your truthiness.
No doubt you have corrected:
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/06... [npr.org]
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/11... [cnn.com]
https://www.federalreserve.gov... [federalreserve.gov]
You clearly have the desire, so, you do you!
Re:Wow, 15 hours and counting (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems like using square is like a deal with the devil. It's great until it isn't.
This is how most of the modern world is. Everything is "optimized" to have as little redundancy as possible (because that's cheaper to not pay for that redundancy). Then something breaks, and the system crashes.
This goes for software, IRL supply chains, manufacturing, pretty much everything unless something is there to force value in the backups.
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Just today in the local news:
One car manufacturer -- Skoda -- stopping its factories because a part supplier in Slovenia has been flooded.
Toyota stopped a factory because one of its supplier's warehouses burned down.
Toyota stopped 14 factories in Japan because it ran out of disk space.
The entire globalization thing sounds like being one bad hard drive away from total failure.
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Toyota stopped a factory because one of its supplier's warehouses burned down.
That one is weird. Car manufacturers are known to use a lot of redundancy in part suppliers. I your tier 1 warehouse burns you call tier 2, and if tier 2 is flooded then you call tier 3.
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Manufacturers in general maybe, specific factories apparently not so much.
Or this one in particular (Toyota Kolin - CZ) has inept management. It's been offline for two weeks, with at least one more week to go.
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Toyota uses just-in-time delivery of parts, so the parts arrive hours or even minutes before they are fitted to a car. They keep as little stock as possible on hand.
If the supply chain is disrupted it's not easy for another manufacturer to step in at short notice. They operate on just-in-time delivery, so don't keep much stock around and can't suddenly ramp up production to meet demand due in a matter of hours.
Overall it's cheaper to do it that way, and have the occasional bit of down-time. Warehouses and s
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I tried getting dinner from two local restaurants last night and they couldn't do anything because of this. They weren't even able to serve me if I came in person and paid cash. It was very disappointing to resort to a national chain to get some sub-par sandwiches.
It seems like using square is like a deal with the devil. It's great until it isn't.
No cash? No sale. Small businesses need to cut off those electronic witchcrafts if they want to survive.
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Your experience means the headline is inaccurate. The outage prevents the business from accepting *payments*. Maybe they have it all connected with the accounting.
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It's senseless for these businesses not to have a backup peyment method. Paypal? Venmo? Something. I get if they don't want to deal in cash, there are special risks associated with that, but not being able to process payments is also a kind of risk for your business.
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From the brief conversation I had with each place it sounded as if their entire order management system was taken out by this outage. There was no way for them to even enter the orders so that they could send them to the kitchen. I'm guessing Square must offer some kind of integrated software system that "does it all" for them and there just wasn't a way to reliably switch to paper tickets and cash payments.
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That's even worse. All in one remotely hosted solutions are a great way to have your whole business crater all at once.
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Many places, restaurants especially it seems use a POS ticketing system that's completely tied up. I see a lot from Square, but Clover and others are in on it. I'm
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Hmmm. I wonder why regular banks and the VISA system is more expensive. High availability and redundancy might be one of the reasons.
Remember: The latest bleeding edge technology will most likely cut you deep. It's right in the name.
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High availability and redundancy
Also paper redundancy. With credit cards from VISA/Mastercard, the business owner would have an imprint machine to copy embossed cards on carbon paper, a system that works for a century. They probably don't need that machine for years but they still should find it in the manager's office.
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Imprint machines haven't been used since the advent of non-embossed cards.
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Hmmm. I wonder why regular banks and the VISA system is more expensive. High availability and redundancy might be one of the reasons.
MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS!
Re: Wow, 15 hours and counting (Score:2)
Working retail, I've seen regular old credit processing go out on a semi-regular basis. This is not specific to Square. Though the length of the outage is longer than I've experienced, there is nothing special here.
That's why the big physical credit card imprint sliders exist. They at least prove there was a card there with the number printed on it. And they aren't subject to human error missing or transposing a digit.
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I just got a replacement credit card a couple months ago. There are no raised numbers - in fact, there are no numbers on the front at all! The card number is printed (just printed, not raised) on the back of the card - same side as the CVV code. It seems a bit weird.
I noticed a friend's credit card - from a different issuer - is exactly the same. So neither of these cards would work with those imprint sliders.
It seems like a low key end of an era. Way back when I was a student, I worked a retail job. Back t
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CashApp down as well (Score:2)
And it's ongoing. DDoS?
good. (Score:1)
I hope every "we don't take cash" business completely fucking dies.
No, I mean it: with the allowance that they can upcharge to offset cc fees, there is no financial reason to not take cash.
What this ends up being is a band aid hiding pervasive crime and failed city policies, as areas that should be devoid of businesses can still sort of limp along with less fear of robbery.
Re: good. (Score:2)
my opinion is if the owner wants their workers pay for o be stochastic, the owner should participate in the risk and go to a pay-what-you-like mod.
Anecdote (Score:2)
Me, I shrugged, and pulled a 20 from my wallet.
Cash has 99.999999% uptime.
Re: Anecdote (Score:2)
And 1000% more theft.
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If someone steals your wallet they steal the money in your wallet.
If someone steals your credit card (with the ability to use it) they steal the money in your bank account.
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What are you talking about?
You steal my credit card, I call the bank and they invalidate the card. At most I'm responsible for $50, though most places cover that too. This is by law.
You might be confusing a credit card with a debit card, which is linked to a bank account. In those cases, yes, they may have full access to your bank funds.
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...and then Visa gives you your money back.
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...and then Visa gives you your money back.
And you're paying a lot to Visa for this service. Visa/MC announced in fact that they are increasing credit card processing fees to deal with fraud: https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
You're paying far more in credit card processing fees than makes sense for the service and the insurance against fraud provided.
Hyperfragile (Score:3)
There's no escape from complexity.
Great, we've outsourced our complexity.
Great, we've centralized our complexity to save a few bucks.
Great, our single point of failure has usually be OK.
Oh, no, we've banned cash and now cannot earn any revenue while our labor and supply contracts ensure liabilities.
But doing daily bank deposits sure was a pain!
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But doing daily bank deposits sure was a pain!
Given the rarities of these outages, yes bank deposits were not just a pain, but a cost that is significantly higher than simply closing up shop for a day and going to lie on the beach.
People have this romantic fantasy that these kinds of outages are world ending. They aren't. Any business that can't happily weather a day or two of closure is a business that was dipping their toes in the pool of bankruptsy.
There's a very real cost of maanging cash, and that cost is far far higher than credit card fees, and
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There's a very real cost of maanging cash, and that cost is far far higher than credit card fees, and system outages.
This is not true. The Bundesbank did a report on this in 2019.
(https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/800766/0462923c3587a2d98f2c2db5b71047ae/mL/2019-06-kosten-zahlungsmittel-data.pdf)
The report found that transactions under €50 were cheapest to process with cash. Transactions over €50 were cheapest to do with Girocard, a German interbanking payment system. At no point were MC/Visa cheaper.
Square has gone down for half-an-hour previously? (Score:2)
Bergh said he'd never experienced a Square outage lasting more than half-an-hour.
Half-an-hour outages? What kind of operation is this?
And did I read right: they have one datacenter?