In a viral TikTok video, a bartender shared her conspiracy theory about why payment systems, including Square and Cash App, were down last week.
The outage she is referring to took place through parts of Thursday and Friday of the last week. Square is used by many small businesses, and the outage affected their ability to access their account and process payments. Square and Cash App are both under Block. Inc.
Square’s outages spiked at 18,000 outage reports on Thursday afternoon, and CashApp had more than 7,000 outages around 7 p.m. ET, according to reports Yahoo Finance collected from the website DownDetector.
In the clip, Angie Marie (@crazy_bartender110) shares that she works as a bartender at a restaurant that uses Square as its point of sales system. When the crash happened, the restaurant couldn’t process credit cards or put in tips. She initially thought it was just Square that wasn’t working and didn’t realize how “severe” the issue was until she heard about Zelle and Apple Pay also being down. (While one website did report on the multiple outages, the majority of online news is about the Square and CashApp outages.)
“Obviously, there was a cyberattack on our systems because for all of those systems to just crash like that, same time, same day, same everything, worldwide. It’s obviously an attack on us,” Angie Marie claims.
She added that she wanted to make a TikTok to inform people about it since she only saw a few articles on the issue but no widespread coverage.
“Why isn’t it on national news? Something is going on, and they don’t want to talk about it. But I’m gonna talk about it,” she said.
@crazy_bartender110 #greenscreen whats really going on? #square #cashapp #venmo #systemsdown ♬ original sound – Angie Marie
In a blog post, Square stated there was no evidence that the crash was due to a cyberattack. Rather, they explained the daylong outage was due to a DNS issue. DNS, which stands for domain name system, is the technology that allows servers to look up a domain name in its database and uses the IP address to connect to a website. Basically, without a DNS, the internet doesn’t work properly.
The company added that in addition to there being no evidence of a cybersecurity attack, there is no evidence that “any seller or buyer data was compromised by the outage.”
“While making several standard changes to our internal network software, the combination of updates prevented our systems from properly communicating with each other, and ultimately caused the disruption. The issue also affected many of our internal tools for troubleshooting and support, making them temporarily unavailable,” the statement read.
For future outages, the company pointed users to the site IsSquareUp.com to get real-time updates and information about issues.
Were this to happen again, Square advised users to use Offline Mode, a capability that is being expanded on new hardware devices and many existing ones.
The video has more than 310,000 views and over 700 comments as of Wednesday afternoon.
“Whats really going on?” the caption read.
Several commenters were also alarmed by the outage.
“It felt like it was a dry run for what’s to come,” a person said.
“Internet hasn’t been working right for a month or so. In and out all day long for weeks,” another wrote.
“I keep getting kicked out of my bank and financial institutions when I try to check balanaces etc. why? Makes me nervous,” a commenter wrote.
Many others shared that they too, were affected by the banking outage.
The Daily Dot reached out to Angie Marie via email.
