Science

Square Cash App Reveals Why Payments Were Pending

The app is suffering from "degraded performance."

Square

Square’s Cash App said the company was suffering from connectivity issues Friday, February 1, 2019, as the company appeared to struggle to process payments. Users on social media reported that they were unable to send or receive payments with a majority of complaints posted between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Eastern. It’s not the first time this has happened.

The outages were fairly widespread, according to data from the web service outage tracker Outage.Report. A majority of them were centered in the East Coast of the United States and Appalachia, with some smaller hotspots in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and a few other major cities.

The app cited connectivity problems on its support site and Twitter. As of 3 p.m. Eastern, Cash App said it was working to catch up with pending payments and urged users not to resend their transactions.

“Some Cash App customers may still be experiencing delayed payments. If you’ve attempted to send or receive a payment and it’s pending, there’s no need to retry,” stated the support site. “We’re working to get payments caught up and we’ll be back with more information soon.”

Outage.Reports was receiving up to 167 reports of Cash App's outage every 20 minutes, as of 3 p.m. on Friday, February 1, 2019.

Outage.Reports

Users of the payment app took to Twitter to ask what was going on and when they should expect a fix. Cash App’s support account replied to a handful of complaints with an apology and the same message posted on their support page.

The payment app has suffered sluggish performance and outages in the past, with the company usually citing overuse. It’s unclear if that’s the case this time. Cash App did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If you’re worried about your money being in limbo, check your bank account to see if the funds have cleared. The timing of this issue comes at an annoying time for many users who are trying to use the app to pay rent at the beginning of the month.

Square, headed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, introduced the Cash app as a way of transferring money between people.

The app competes with ventures like Venmo and PayPal for convenient transfers, an area that has been disrupted in recent years by the emergence of decentralized cryptocurrency payments.

As of June 2018, the app had been downloaded 33.5 million times surpassing Venmo in total downloads.

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