Some small business owners around the country were doing very little business for a few hours this afternoon, thanks to a widespread network outage for mobile payment system Square.

Square announced shortly after 3 p.m. ET that service had returned to “near normal levels” after its servers went offline for several hours Thursday afternoon.

“It is possible that some intermittent issues may occur for the next 15 minutes, but functionality should largely be restored,” the company said in a notice on its website.

Customers who continue to experience issues were advised to close and restart the app, but not to delete the app from their devices. This is especially important for merchants who used the app in the offline mode in order to continue taking payment during the outage.

“We’re continuing to monitor the situation, and will provide additional updates,” the company said.

The service outage began around 1 p.m. ET, with Square announcing that it was investigating multiple outages impacting various Square services.

Since then, the company updated customers about the status of the outage on its website every 15 minutes.

The company identified the cause about an hour after the outage began, but did not provide specifics as to what the issue was.

“We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, though unfortunately we do not have an immediate timeline for resolution,” the company said.

Square added that its merchant authentication service was degraded, which was affecting payments and other Square services.

Merchants who were logged into the service were urged to switch to offline mode to continue taking swipe payments. Doing this allows the system to record the swipe and process them once service is restored.

Users who were not logged into Square were told to take alternative forms of payment.

Shortly before 3 p.m. ET, the company said it was beginning to see “initial positive improvements in response to the steps we have taken to remove load from the affected service.”

 

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