Small businesses across Australia have struggled to process sales today after a widespread service outage affected online payment service Square.
Smartronic owner Tim Webbers told that he lost hundreds of dollars in sales after his Square device went offline this morning.
A Square spokesperson said they were aware of the “disruption” to businesses, which was also impacting businesses internationally.
“We are currently experiencing issues with multiple Square services,” the spokesperson said.
“We understand how important it is for business that our services be up and running, and we are actively working toward a fix.”
Webbers, who owns multiple stores across Melbourne’s east, said he hadn’t heard anything directly from Square about the outage.
He said the platform had been approving transactions for customers but not registering on the side of the business.
“When people were swiping their card it could come up to processing transactions, and it would approve. Then it would come up Square was unavailable,” Webbers said.
“From 9am-10am my shop was giving away products for free. They could have let us know they were having issues, but they didn’t.”
“We actually were having issues with Square three days ago and we completely replaced the hardware, which we received yesterday and today it’s not working because of a bigger issue that will be impacting businesses everywhere.”
In the latest update at 3.45pm, a Square spokesperson thanked customers for their patience and said they had the “right people on this” to resolve the problem.
“Checking in to let you know that our engineers are still working on a resolution. We’ll continue to update you as we learn more.”
(9 NEWS)
