Square outage history

Square customers experienced intermittent disruptions processing Mastercard payments at the point of sale, causing some transactions to fail or require retries. A workaround was to use a non-Mastercard payment method where available. The disruption began around 4:51 AM UTC and started in the Japan region before broader regional impact was observed.

Square reported intermittent disruptions with Mastercard payment processing at point of sale, affecting payment acceptance across Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Customers attempting Mastercard payments could experience failures or delays, and Square recommended using a non-Mastercard form of payment where available as a workaround.

The incident began at 4:36 AM UTC and was resolved by 5:51 AM UTC, lasting about an hour and fifteen minutes. Square's Engineering team investigated the issue and worked to restore full payment acceptance across the affected regions.

Square experienced a dashboard disruption that impacted Point of Sale and Payment Acceptance across multiple regions, preventing card payments and disrupting in-person transactions for a period. Affected areas included Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with users reporting issues completing payments and using POS devices. Affected devices were directed to install app versions 7.18.1 or 7.19 via the in-device software update path as a workaround. Impact began around 8:56 PM UTC as the issue surfaced on the Dashboard and engineers investigated. User reports came from multiple regions, indicating a broad, global impact on merchants relying on Square POS and card payments.

By 9:31 PM UTC, Square had released a fix and started to see services returning to full functionality, with operations stabilizing across the affected regions. A broader recovery followed, and all components listed in the incident transitioned back to normal by 1:51 AM UTC. Reports from merchants suggested payments and POS functions were returning to normal as the rollout completed.

Impact centered on delayed sales reporting data for Square Reports, affecting reporting dashboards and analytics across multiple regions. Transactions and payments continued to process normally, while Point of Sale and Dashboard components in US, Canada, UK, France, Ireland, Spain, Japan, and Australia experienced data delays. The issue began at 9:01 PM UTC and was resolved by 10:06 PM UTC.

In Square's status updates, engineers described a data disruption affecting delayed sales reporting across Square Reports and confirmed that transactions and payments remained unaffected. A single user report from Federal Way, WA described screen glitches when attempting to transfer funds, illustrating user-facing friction alongside reporting delays.

A disruption in Square payments impacted payment acceptance in the United Kingdom and Australia, with some transactions failing or being declined. The issue began at 5:01 PM UTC and was first noted as a Payments Disruption affecting the UK and Australia payment-acceptance components. By 10:01 PM UTC the status indicated a small subset of payments were affected, with guidance to work around the problem by trying another card, tapping or dipping a physical card, or using a mobile wallet. The disruption persisted for more than a day and a half and was reported resolved for the UK and Australia components by 1:42 AM UTC.

Square experienced a disruption in payment acceptance in Japan, with some Visa and Mastercard transactions declined at the point of sale. The incident began at 11:46 PM UTC when the Japan Payment Acceptance component moved to warn, and Square attributed the disruption to a problem with its payment processing partner. Over the next hours, merchants were advised to use alternative payment methods as the partner worked to resolve the issue, with the impact expanding to include debit transactions by 1:06 AM UTC.

In Japan, onboarding and setup inquiries drove higher-than-expected wait times for phone support. The issue began at 1:31 AM UTC when the Japan phone support component was listed as a degraded state, and waits continued for about a week as the volume of requests remained elevated. The situation eased when the status returned to up at 2:46 AM UTC.

Square Online storefronts in Australia, Canada, and the United States were affected as a DoorDash disruption temporarily disabled new orders and menu syncing for Square sellers. The issue originated upstream with DoorDash and did not impact Square POS or other ordering channels. Users could have experienced missing menus and failures to place new DoorDash orders through Square Online during the incident window, with the disruption unfolding across the three regions.

Square reported a brief degradation of the Japan Payment Acceptance component, affecting payment processing in Japan for about 5 minutes. The issue began at 3:16 PM UTC and was resolved by 3:21 PM UTC. The provider issued two status updates during the incident, noting the Japan Payment Acceptance component as degraded before it returned to normal. The impact was regional to Japan, with other Square services remaining unaffected.

Square POS payments experienced a brief disruption affecting in-person payment processing. Merchants in Canada, including reports from British Columbia and Manitoba, reported that POS transactions could not be completed. The outage lasted about 8 minutes, from 9:34 PM UTC to 9:42 PM UTC.

StatusGator detected the issue at Feb 26, 2026 9:34 PM UTC, providing an Early Warning Signal ahead of any official Square acknowledgment. There were no updates published on Square's status page during the event.

The impact was localized to Canadian merchants with briefly interrupted payment acceptance, with no reported impact outside that region.