The Square saga continues with CEO Alyssa Henry to depart on 2 October. According to a regulatory filing, Block Head and co-founder Jack Dorsey, will lead Square after she departs.
Square’s service collapse initially began on 7 September. It continued on into 8 September. The end result: Square merchants unable to process payments. They were not even able to access their accounts.
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“Lawyers will already be salivating” – Grant Halverson
The potential cost to Square in terms of legal claims is hard to quantify. Merchants will want lost sales refunded. It will not be enough for Square merely to refund merchant fees charged, Class actions cannot be ruled out.
Square’s outage impacted a number of markets including Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, UK and US.
Social media was abuzz with customer complaints.
Square now concedes that it fumbled its handling of the outage. The outage impacted a number of markets including Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, UK and US.
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By GlobalDataSquare caters mainly to small and mid-size businesses. It has cited a domain name system error as the reason for the service collapse.
Square competitors have lost no time to publicise the issues at Square.
Grant Halverson, CEO of McLean Roche, tells EPI: “Point-of-sale rival Shift4 jumped on the outage last week as an opportunity to lure customers. It posted on X: “Tired of unexpected processing interruptions?” with the hashtags #squaredown and #squareoutage”
“WorldPay took aim at Square as did many others. Merchant GMV (sales) for 2023 are an estimated $224bn (2022 Sales $204 bn). One days lost sales equals $613.6m. Four days would take this well over $2bn. Lawyers will already be salivating.”
Before joining Square, Henry was VP of Amazon Web Services Storage Services and also held a senior role at Microsoft.
