Square outage renders small businesses unable to transact

A national outage of one of the nation’s leading payment terminal providers is wreaking havoc across retailers, with Square unable to say when services will be restored.

Cafe owner Nat Pitak and a staff member at Cafe Claire in the Sydney inner west suburb of Annandale. Picture: Joseph Lam

Small businesses across the country have been unable to transact, with many cafes unable to take payment for morning coffees and breakfasts as a fintech outage leaves the payment terminals unusable.

Some businesses say customers just walked away on Friday when informed that card payments were unavailable and they were asked to pay in cash.

The havoc related to a national outage at global fintech Square which is understood to be causing major issues across the country.

At family-run Cafe Claire in Sydney’s inner west suburb of Annandale, the majority of its morning business was lost to the outage.

Owner and mother of two Nat Pitak said about 150 customers had visited the cafe this morning and only a handful had cash on hand to pay. Some grabbed coffee and offered to return the next day to pay.

“This is the reason we changed from Tyro to Square a couple of years ago. We had similar problems with outages,” she said.

Ms Pitak said this was the fourth outage the cafe had faced with Square this year, noting the same had happened in February and May also.

Most customers hadn’t paid for cash in years and as a small business, it had no other way to take payment, she said.

“We’re just a small business and the government doesn’t do anything to help in situations like this.”

Payment terminal provider Square, a subsidiary of Jack Dorsey’s company Block, confirmed on Friday one of its data centres was being investigated by engineers to determine the problem.

At 5am AEST, Square had identified the data centre as “causing an impact on multiple Square services”.

It is not clear where that data centre is located, however the company has recommended that customers do not log out of their Square accounts.

“While we investigate the disruption to our Data Center which is currently impacting multiple Square Services, we recommend that Sellers stay logged into their account and avoid logging out,” the company said.

When asked how many terminals were down and when services would resume, The Australian was pointed to a Twitter post with a link to a website which told users to check a second Square website.

A Square terminal receiving payment from an Afterpay card, which the company began accepting in May last year.

“We are currently experiencing issues with multiple Square services. We understand how important it is for your business that our services be up and running, and we are actively working toward a fix,” it read.

“We’ll keep you updated at http://issquareup.com as we learn more.”

As of midday on Friday Square was yet to fix the problem and said it wanted to assure customers it was working hard to solve the issue.

“We realise that this disruption is impacting many businesses at the moment. We’ve got the right people on this and we’re fully committed to resolving the problem as soon as we can,” an update published at 11.30am stated.