Security News > 2023 > September > Square: Last week’s outage was caused by DNS issue, not a cyberattack
Payment processing firm Square says a widespread outage that took down a large part of the company's infrastructure last week was caused by a DNS issue.
The 14-hour-long outage affected Square payment acceptance and other services and led to customers being unable to log into their accounts or process payments starting Thursday, around noon.
While Square did not provide any information during the downtime or soon after as to what caused the outage, they finally released a statement on Monday stating that the outage was caused by a DNS misconfiguration.
Following last week's incident, Square said it deployed some DNS server and firewall changes that should prevent similar problems and limit the risk of outages in the future.
Square is also expanding support for Offline Mode to "All new Square hardware devices and most existing devices," allowing sellers to accept card payments even during outages or when the Internet connection is down.
"If Offline Mode is not currently available on your devices, you can use a Square Magstripe Reader to take offline payments. If you don't have one already, order your first one for free here," the company said.