Commitment to Reliability: How Square is Strengthening Platform Performance for Sellers
By Willem Avé, Head of Product
This year has been remarkable for Square’s product innovation and velocity: we’ve launched new hardware, rolled out time-saving and efficiency-driving AI-powered tools, and introduced a variety of features that help sellers streamline operations and grow their businesses. What’s less visible are all of the updates we’ve shipped to bolster platform resilience and improve Square’s reliability.
Reliability is at the core of everything we build. Our teams spend countless hours listening to business owners’ pain points to inform our work and accelerate our ability to work on the most impactful enhancements. Over the past 12 months, those insights have enabled us to deliver measurable improvements across a number of areas, including hardware connectivity, software performance, and infrastructure resilience, while also giving sellers more control and visibility of their business operations through the Square Dashboard.
Platform Reliability That Actually Matters
When it comes to real-world commerce, reliability means more than just uptime percentages. For sellers, their systems need to just work, whether they’re meeting the morning coffee rush, serving a full dining room, or navigating holiday shoppers. That’s why we’ve established dedicated engineering teams focused exclusively on platform performance, because reliability translates to increased revenue, happier customers, and more peace of mind for business owners.
These investments are driving tangible results. Our strategic decision to operate Square’s most critical systems across multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions helped limit the seller impact of October’s AWS outage. Additional work over the past year to improve hardware connectivity has cut Square Reader disconnects by 70%, while software refinements have resulted in a 43% reduction in POS app crash rates and a 48% increase in checkout speed, as well as 30% faster load times for Square Dashboard. Taken together, these optimizations represent critical engineering work across our entire technology stack, all in service of minimizing disruption, keeping lines moving, and helping sellers make that sale every time.
Reinforcing the Network
While these improvements go a long way to making Square’s hardware, software, and overall platform more resilient, internet disruptions are a common problem that sellers face – and something we’re also focused on mitigating. Network issues are often the root cause of service hiccups: a seller’s Wi-Fi goes down, and suddenly payments come to a halt, printers stop working, online orders stop hitting the POS, and kitchen displays go dark. It’s a domino effect that can bring the most robust platforms to a halt.
That’s why we’ve made meaningful enhancements to our offline payments functionality. For sellers that allow offline payments, Square now automatically switches to taking offline payments when connectivity goes down so sales can keep flowing. As soon as they’re back online, those transactions are processed, making internet outages and Square disruptions less impactful.
We have also partnered with Ubiquiti to make professional-grade networking solutions more accessible to small businesses. Through this partnership, we’re helping sellers get access to premium equipment right from the Square Shop and ensuring proper set-up through detailed installation guides or, in certain instances, through professional installation.
Putting More Control into Sellers’ Hands
Because sellers want to know what’s happening with their systems and have agency over how to respond when there are issues, we’ve invested in building out new monitoring and configuration tools. We’ve made a number of improvements to our Device Hub, which lets business owners monitor and manage all their Square devices from one place, whether they’re in the store, at home, on the go, or need to remotely manage the equipment at another shop location. This command center gives sellers a real-time view of their devices’ status, allows them to drill deeper into any hardware experiencing issues, and streamlines the ability to change settings for a given device.
The Work Continues
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made over the last year, but there is always more work to be done. Reliability is an ongoing commitment, and we’ll continue investing in the infrastructure, tools, and capabilities that help sellers succeed.
Every enhancement we make is guided by a simple principle: Square should work reliably for every business that relies on us. As we continue to expand our platform capabilities and serve businesses of increasing scale and complexity, reliability remains the foundation that enables everything else. These improvements demonstrate our commitment to operational excellence and our understanding that trust is earned through consistent performance when it matters most.