Square payment outage raises red flags at the Reserve Bank

afr.com:

Square’s day-long payment system outage has attracted the attention of the Reserve Bank, which is considering whether the Block-owned company should be forced to start disclosing when its technology goes down, so small businesses can compare its reliability against banks’ terminal offerings.

Square suffered widespread processing problems on Friday that prevented thousands of Australian small businesses from accepting card payments. This was caused by an internal software update that stopped its systems communicating, the US-based company told customers in an email on Monday.

Block-owned Square suffered a big outage on Friday. Bloomberg

More than 18,000 Square outages in Australia were reported to Downdetector. Square does not report the number of merchant terminals it has in Australia, but says it serves “millions of merchants” across the globe.

Its payment services in the United States were also hit by the problem, that appears to have been triggered by a bug in a scheduled update to its “domain name system” infrastructure.

In its customer email, seen by The Australian Financial Review, Square apologised for the length of time it took to restore systems, its irregular communications, and a “delayed support response” to customers calling for help.

Square’s small business customers also remain in the dark about its reliability compared with bank terminals, and other providers such as Tyro. This is because it does not report “retail payment service reliability” figures to the Reserve Bank – which publishes them quarterly for other providers.

Under current regulations, Square does not have to report the data, as it does not operate a direct “exchange settlement account” with the RBA.

However, the RBA is now considering