# Incident Summary: 2017-03-16

DevFeed: [Incident Summary: 2017-03-16](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/incident-summary-2017-03-16-15691.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://developer.squareup.com/blog/incident-summary-2017-03-16>)

Author: Square Engineering

Published: 2017-03-17T20:13:05Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Square Corner Blog RSS Feed](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/square-corner-blog-rss-feed.md>)

Topics: [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [Authentication](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/authentication.md>), [Back end](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/backend.md>), [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/bug.md>), [API](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/api.md>), [datacenter](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/datacenter.md>), [Monitoring](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/monitoring.md>)

Tags: [api](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/api.md>), [authentication](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/authentication.md>), [backend](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backend.md>), [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/bug.md>), [datacenter](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/datacenter.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [identity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/identity.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [monitoring](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/monitoring.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [services](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/services.md>)

## AI overview

Square's March 16, 2017 service outage affected most products and services, including payment processing, Point of Sale, Dashboard, Appointments, and Payroll. The incident was caused by an unrecoverably overloaded merchant authentication service due to a bug in an adjacent service. Most services recovered by 11:55 a.m. PDT, while SMS delivery of two-factor authentication codes recovered at 1:12 p.m. PDT.

## Source excerpt

Authors: Erik Bourget, Toby Reyelts, and Xavier Shay