Square says the widespread outage that hit its payment terminals last week was caused by a DNS failure and not a cyberattack nor an intrusion.
During that 14-hour downtime, businesses across the US, UK, and beyond that relied on Square's point-of-sale systems were unable to process customers' credit and debit cards, hitting sales significantly. Restaurants, cafes, and shops were left asking punters to pay by cash or use another method like Venmo to transfer money to cover bills.
Some owners complained of losing thousands and thousands of dollars as the IT meltdown continued from Thursday into Friday. CashApp was also affected by the outage.
Shares in Block, which operates Square and CashApp, fell more than five percent during the fiasco. The San Francisco-based biz today blamed updates to its network infrastructure for breaking its DNS, bringing down services.
"The outage impacted an important part of our infrastructure, known as a Domain Name System, or DNS," Square explained Monday in a brief postmortem report.
"While making several standard changes to our internal network software, the combination of updates prevented our systems from properly communicating with each other, and ultimately caused the disruption.
"The issue also affected many of our internal tools for troubleshooting and support, making them temporarily unavailable. There is no evidence that this was a cybersecurity event or that any seller or buyer data was compromised by the outage."
Here's our timeline of Square's IT woes last week:
By 0700 PT on Friday, Square said it had fixed its broken IT systems that had brought down its services since midday the day before, and apologized.
Square also outlined how it hopes to avoid this sort of meltdown again:
Finally, you know how the haiku goes. It's not DNS. There's no way it's DNS.
It was DNS. ®
https://www.theregister.com//2023/09/11/square_dns/
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024