Outage Metrics
Like most tech companies, Square, aka Block, reports outages for its popular payment processing services.
Below you can see 3 outages so far in Sept, with one underway. On the bottom of the image, it says that NO incidents were reported in August.
But if we travel back in time…
Presto! There were three outages in August, on this screen shot taken in August.
This clearly shows three August outages, despite isSquareup.com US history claiming no August outages.
What’s going on here?
Best guess, there is a rolling 30 day filter removing old outages and someone was careless with the 2 month label. This creates the misleading impression that the Square services are more stable than they really are.
Why does it matter? ~50% of the Square engineers were laid off earlier this year due to AI. Anyone trying to assess how stable the Square service is post-AI layoff may come away with an overly rosy impression.