Square falls over worldwide

Ian Rogers

Australian businesses were severely affected by a worldwide meltdown of Square’s payments processing on Friday. 
 
The outage, which started in the early hours Sydney time, lasted around 18 hours. 
 
As the largest counterparty by volume using Cuscal’s payments processing platform, Square may have into the hundreds of thousands of clients in Australia. These will be overwhelmingly sole traders and very small businesses that have taken to the (literally) off-the-shelf, little-fuss point-of-sale payments solutions promoted by Square (and more recent arrivals such as Zeller) with gusto over recent years.
 
Square attributed the outage to a “disruption with one of our Data Centres” or did so at one point on Friday (and credit to Square for keeping its Australian, and global, user base pretty regularly updated).
 
Block’s CashApp was also affected.
 
Through a spokesperson, Square said: “as we continue to get all functionality back up and running, we are investigating what improvements we need to make to prevent these situations in the future. We apologise for the inconvenience this disruption has caused to businesses.”
 
Square accounts for roughly half Block’s earnings, generating US$3 billion in profit for the US tech giant (better known to followers of the company in the local market for its overpriced, all scrip takeover of Afterpay in 2021).