[gmisra]

Anecdata from a popular coffee shop ~1 mile from Square HQ:

- Staff at the cafe are extremely frustrated, no real visibility into what's going on.

- Finding the status page was a struggle. Following @square and @sqsupport was insufficient, as both accounts have been publicly silent during the entire outage. The status page, hosted at the non-obvious issquareup.com, is only listed on the profile pages of those social accounts. I located the page and shared it with the cafe staff, which provided some context as to what was going on.

- But, the status page itself was not very useful to them. The information in it is moderately useful for a technical user, but most of Square's POS customers aren't technical? More importantly, most of the hands-on operators of these POS systems are even less technical.

- The only solution offered is to "switch to offline mode", but that only works if your square app hasn't already logged you out, which had happened long before reading about the solution. This behavior corroborated by twitter anecdotes and other comments in this thread.

- There is no other solution path presented.

- Without any other information to share, staff is describing the issue as a "nationwide Square server crash" to all customers.

- Some customers just left when faced with the outage (alternatives are cash or an on-site, fee-based ATM)

- All of this is happening while the staff is continuing to take orders, serve customers, deal with irate customers, and generally be positive and courteous.

- The only reason they retried the app just now is because I read the comment from the Square engineer on this thread announcing service restoration.

Whatever user model Square has of the day-to-day operators of their POS, it seems to be wildly miscalibrated, especially around how to handle incident communication.

[tedmiston]

> - Finding the status page was a struggle. Following @square and @sqsupport was insufficient, as both accounts have been publicly silent during the entire outage.

I mean, it's clear opening the two Twitter account pages, both have sent tons of replies during this time period.

On @sqsupport specifically they clearly state in the bio that their tweets aren't the right place to check for service outages:

> We're currently working through some issues. For live updates, please check http://issquareup.com

So this doesn't solve the problem of bringing Square online but it also doesn't really sound like the merchant is trying very hard as the right channel was easy to find. Besides adding email / text message alerts to merchants for downtime, Square is doing a lot more than most.

[Philip_with1L]

Thanks for posting this, and you're right. I happen to work at a café and follow these type of events. I was unsure and only slightly confused where to get the information. Our boss slack'd the dashboard and then I found the support twitter. I'd bet many non-tech barista were confused where to look for guidance. It all made sense to me once I found it.