Payments company Square suffered a two-hour outage Wednesday, prompting outrage from merchants about losing out on business during peak hours. Shares of its parent company, Block, fell 6% amid a broader market pullback.
Multiple Square services were operating at “degraded performance,” including its payment processing services, according to its systems status page. Only its banking services appeared unaffected during the widespread outage. While the issues were eventually resolved, merchants took to Twitter to express their concerns, noting they were losing sales due to the outage. Some called for Square to refund fees to make them whole.
“So much lost business throughout our locations because of this. Will you guys consider providing free processing to offer some sort of relief for all of the $ we lost (and keep losing) due to this situation?” Arepa Zone, a restaurant, tweeted at Square's support account.
The outage was the second incident in a week, after Square encountered sign-in issues with its Seller Community on Monday. Incident histories on Square's status page suggest widespread outages have been rare, with isolated problems more typical among the scattered outages.