HACKER Q&A
📣 throwboatyface

Why was Square down for 13 hours?


According to `issquareup.com` there was a 13 hour outage yesterday - many API endpoints returned 500 errors, locking customers out of their POS and ecommerce sites.

It seems unlikely Square is going to post a full postmortem, but does anyone have an inside scoop on what engineering at Square is like now and how they could have a half-day outage with almost no communication?


  👤 h2odragon Accepted Answer ✓
I've seen numerous other comments this morning to the effect that there were multiple credit card processors down for various periods yesterday.

👤 lopkeny12ko
Certainly ransomware that corrupted data and required restoring everything from backups. Remember, your backups aren't backups until you've validated they can be restored!