Hi @aeronaut. Not Square here, but I have a few pieces of information. An email with a summary of the cause of the outage is going out now. I know a few sellers who have received it, and a few who have not including myself. Given the number that have to be sent, I’m sure the email is going out in controlled batches and my email address just hasn’t been picked out of the hat, yet.
Written by an engineer? I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one. Block is a publicly-traded company, with a massive legal team. It would be malpractice for a company as big as Square — especially one with shareholders — to allow an engineer to write anything that wasn’t heavily massaged by the legal team first. I own a decent share of stock in Block, Inc, and I would definitely not want something as risky as an engineering report to ever see the light of day publicly. Ha.
From what I’ve heard of the latest email, which you should receive soon, is that there is a quite reasonable explanation that has just enough tech jargon to make sense. Also, I’m told, it has a few steps that they are currently engaged in which should help prevent and/or mitigate the severity of the inevitable next issue.
We may get another update, but it isn't going to be written by an engineer with what failed and where exactly. It will just be general like they are reporting on DNS issues, etc. That kind of stuff will happen in-house but will not see the light of the public as it will contain info that can't be shown publicly like how their infrastructure is built etc. for hackers.
I think the best takeaway is if everyone doesn't already have a backup way to take credit cards or have backup internet this is a good wake-up call. Even with "5 9s" of guaranteed uptime you can have 9 hours down a year.
