Square: Last week’s outage was caused by DNS issue, not a cyberattack

Payment processing patient Square says a wide outage that took down a ample portion of nan company's infrastructure past week was caused by a DNS issue.

The 14-hour-long outage affected Square costs acceptance and different services and led to customers being incapable to log into their accounts aliases process payments starting Thursday, astir noon.

Many customers reported losing thousands of dollars successful income arsenic they were incapable to process payments during this period.

Square's engineering squad said successful a last update to nan charismatic position page that nan issues were resolved successful nan early greeting hours of July 8th, advising customers to sojourn nan company's support halfway and seller organization for answers to "common questions."

While Square did not supply immoderate accusation during nan downtime aliases soon aft arsenic to what caused nan outage, they yet released a connection connected Monday stating that nan outage was caused by a DNS misconfiguration.

"The outage impacted an important portion of our infrastructure, known arsenic a Domain Name System, aliases DNS," nan institution said today.

"While making respective modular changes to our soul web software, nan operation of updates prevented our systems from decently communicating pinch each other, and yet caused nan disruption.

"The rumor besides affected galore of our soul devices for troubleshooting and support, making them temporarily unavailable. There is nary grounds that this was a cybersecurity arena aliases that immoderate seller aliases purchaser information was compromised by nan outage."

Following past week's incident, Square said it deployed immoderate DNS server and firewall changes that should forestall akin problems and limit nan consequence of outages successful nan future.

Square is besides expanding support for Offline Mode to "all caller Square hardware devices and astir existing devices," allowing sellers to judge paper payments moreover during outages aliases erstwhile nan Internet relationship is down.

"If Offline Mode is not presently disposable connected your devices, you tin usage a Square Magstripe Reader to return offline payments. If you don't person 1 already, bid your first 1 for free here," nan institution said.

"We cognize this business was made much difficult by our connection wave and nan delayed support consequence immoderate of you experienced. Our systems person afloat recovered and are operating normally," Square added.

Developed by Block, an American multinational tech conglomerate founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, Square provides commerce and financial services to millions of sellers worldwide and crossed each 50 U.S. states, focusing connected mini and medium-sized businesses.