How did people get Offline Mode to work thru the outage?

[cupzcoffeeaz]

Hi all, 

I was out on a trip and I got back to find that my business suffered quite a bit of lost sales due to the square outage. 

We have the square register, and the offline mode didn't work. I keep offline mode enabled as I don't trust my internet provider, but even then this didn't work during the outage. 

I was looking through Twitter and the announcement from Square that offline mode was working. 

Can someone share how you all get offline mode to work during the outage?  That way I can at least document it and train my staff to use it. I wish offline mode will just work automatically during this things without having to go thru hoops to make it work. 

[TheRealChipA]

Hey @cupzcoffeeaz.  At first, I just turned WiFi off.  Of course, since I have a network-attached printer and KDS, I lost those too.  I’m going to invest in a Bluetooth receipt printer to strengthen my defenses for the next time someone’s network goes out.  

Weirdly, I found a feature/hole/? In POS that I did not know about.  In this case since the entirety of Square was gone, I had a moment of weird inspiration.  I tried leaving it all connected to the network.  What happened was this:

1. I could take order, print them, send them to the KDS, etc. So I had my complete setup available, except for card readers.
2. Interestingly, even though I was online, since the POS couldn’t find Square’s servers it saved all of my transactions as “offline.”  In other words, it acted like it was in offline mode even though it was not technically offline — Square was!
3. When it all came back up, my offline transactions all processed, except for the very last one!  I still can’t figure out why that one was different. LOL

I’m going to report this up the food chain.  It seems that there is already something in the POS software that defaults to being “offline.”  I think that the engineers might be able to track this down and use it to trigger offline mode when payments are down so that we see the dreaded red bar, or even give us a toggle to do it ourselves.  It’s worth looking into, at least.

[aeronaut]

To force offline mode to work properly, we have to completely disconnect the internet connection for the square device (pulling the ethernet plug on wired devices, or turning off wifi on wireless ones). Luckily we did this on Thursday, then accepted offline payments all night without an issue (at risk of accepting cards that will later decline) while Square was down for 12+ hours.

We found during this outage, and also in multiple past outages, offline mode rarely (if ever) triggers properly so we've always had to force it this way when we learn Square is having a meltdown. We only reconnect it once Square has resolved the issue and everything is fully back online (to avoid the risk of the offline transactions not being sent properly during the outage, or sending duplicates). This time, this meant we only reconnected the devices the next day after everything was supposed to be working again, which successfully synced the offline transactions.

@cupzcoffeeaz 

[Candlestore]

@cupzcoffeeaz ;

From Square:

6540-square-terminal-payments-faq 

To enable Offline Mode:

1. Tap More from the navigation bar at the bottom of your screen.
2. Tap Settings > Checkout > Offline Mode.
3. Toggle Allow Offline Mode to on.
4. Review the information and then tap Allow Offline Mode.
5. To set a limit for card transactions taken offline, enter an amount next to Per-Transaction Limit.

The link says its for Terminal but I think it should work for all devices....?