How To Deal With A Payments Outage

What can businesses do when their payment provider fails?

Disclaimer: views expressed here are my own and do not represent any other organisation

Businesses around the world were unable to take payments when Square suffered a total outage earlier this month. The outage started on the 7th of September and took almost 24 hours to resolve. 

The business impact of this outage was significant. Merchants couldn’t accept payments via their Square devices for the duration. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

Jesse Stommel, owner of PlayForge, a toy-and-games store in Littleton, Colo., said they asked customers if they could manually write down their credit-card information. “Some customers just walked away,” he said. Stommel estimated he lost around 30% of usual weekday business.

“If this had happened on a Saturday, we would’ve lost a huge portion of our weekly business,” Stommel said.

Some businesses, such as a Blue Bottle Coffee in downtown San Francisco, taped “cash only” signs on their doors Thursday afternoon. Businesses as far away as Australia sa…