The after-effect of Square’s recent outage has sent shockwaves through several businesses in Portland, Oregon. The popular credit card transaction service ‘Square’ crashed for more than 24 hours this week. This unforeseen disruption left many entrepreneurs grappling with profit losses and seeking alternative solutions to minimize future risks.
Nate Tilden, a prominent restaurateur in Portland, voiced his frustration, highlighting the significant impact of Square’s downtime. katu.com reported him as saying that this wasn’t the first time the service had experienced an outage this year, emphasizing the need for businesses to diversify their payment processing options.
During the outage, Tilden’s restaurants had to depend on manual credit card information collection, affecting nearly 95% of transactions.
The repercussions extended beyond the restaurant industry, as “Friendship Kitchen” in Portland lamented it as one of the worst days in their business history.
Their Instagram post revealed that they lost approximately three-quarters of their transactions during the outage, underscoring the vulnerability of businesses reliant on a single payment service provider.
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Square responded the incident by issuing an apology and initiated an investigation into the root causes of the outage.
While they offer essential services to a large number of businesses, this incident has underscored the need for companies to consider redundancy in their financial services.
This incident has also encouraged businesses to think of diversifying their payment processing options and implement contingency plans to minimize the impact of such incidents in the future.
