Outages at Square, Cash App causing widespread problems for users

Thousands of Square and Cash App customers were unable to access their accounts or send money on Thursday and early Friday due to system outages impacting both payment services.

Outage reports for both platforms picked up around the same time on Thursday afternoon, according to data from outage tracker Downdetector. In the hours following, numerous customers took to social media to share error messages and frustrations about not being able to access their money.

“Since around noon PT on Thursday, sellers have been unable to access accounts or process payments due to a systems outage within Square,” Square wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, shortly before 7 a.m. ET Friday morning.

“We know you trust us with your business, and these situations add challenges to running your operations. For that, we are truly sorry.”

On its website, Square said it has identified the source of the problem and services are “steadily regaining their functionality,” but a total fix has not yet been fully implemented.

“Our engineers have worked on a solution for this disruption and they plan to make it available in an upcoming update,” the company said around midday Friday. “We will continue monitoring and provide updates as they occur. Thank you for your continued patience.”

Cash App down, too

The parent company of Square is San Francisco-based Block Inc., and another of the company’s payment systems was having problems on Friday, too.

Cash App, which isn’t available in Canada, also experienced an outage on Thursday evening. As of Friday morning, the company said that customers could once again add cash, make purchases with their Cash Card and buy Bitcoin — but not all services had fully returned yet.

“We’re continuing to get the ability to send payments and cash out back up and running,” Cash App wrote on its status page Friday morning.

On Thursday night, the payment service urged those experiencing issues to “not reattempt any actions, such as sending and receiving payments.”