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.

Many customers reported losing thousands of dollars in sales as they were unable to process payments during this period.

Square's engineering team said in a final update to the official status page that the issues were resolved in the early morning hours of July 8th, advising customers to visit the company's support center and seller community for answers to "common questions."

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.

"The outage impacted an important part of our infrastructure, known as a Domain Name System, or DNS," the company said today.

"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."

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.

"We know this situation was made more difficult by our communication frequency and the delayed support response some of you experienced. Our systems have fully 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 across all 50 U.S. states, focusing on small and medium-sized businesses.