Digital Money Meltdown: Square's DNS Outage Raises Red Flags for Cashless Society

Payment service Square said its outage last week was caused by an issue with its Domain Name System, or DNS, and did not stem from a cyberattack.

Users of Square and mobile payment service Cash App, also owned by Block Inc., reported issues accessing their accounts and processing payments on Thursday and Friday. Both companies said their services were back up and running by Friday afternoon.

Reported outages for Square spiked Thursday afternoon with more than 18,000 outage reports, while more than 9,000 outages were reported for Cash App around 7 p.m. Eastern, according to reports collected by the website DownDetector.

Square, which is widely used among small businesses, said some users had been unable to access accounts or process payments. The company updated its website around 1:15 p.m. Eastern to say the service disruptions had been resolved and all systems were operational.

On Monday, Square said the outage impacted its DNS, "an important part" of its infrastructure. A combination of updates to its internal network software prevented its systems from properly communicating with each other, causing the disruption and making "many" of its internal troubleshooting and support tools unavailable, according to the company.

"There is no evidence that this was a cybersecurity event or that any seller or buyer data was compromised by the outage," Square said in the online statement.

Cash App's website said it identified the cause of the outage Thursday night. In a 12:34 p.m. Eastern post on Friday, it said it resolved "the majority of issues." Cash App warned that users may still experience some delays.

Originally published by Bailey Schulz at USA Today