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Square said there was \u201cno evidence\u201d a cyberattack caused an outage that left customers and small businesses unable to use the payment giant\u2019s technology<\/a> on Thursday through early-Friday.<\/p>\n The payments technology giant said in a post-mortem of the daylong outage that the issue was caused by a DNS issue. DNS, or domain name system, is the global protocol that converts human-readable web addresses into IP addresses, which allow computers to find and load websites from all over the world.<\/p>\n But if a company\u2019s DNS settings are misconfigured or incorrectly changed, at worst it can cause the entire company to appear as if it\u2019s dropped off the internet. That\u2019s what happened with Square.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile making several standard changes to our internal network software, the combination of updates prevented our systems from properly communicating with each other, and ultimately caused the disruption. The issue also affected many of our internal tools for troubleshooting and support, making them temporarily unavailable,\u201d Square said in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n DNS issues are not rare, if anything they\u2019re relatively commonplace because DNS is notoriously complicated and easy to get wrong. There is an adage in cybersecurity circles: It\u2019s always DNS, and if it\u2019s not DNS, it\u2019s probably BGP (a similarly complicated internet protocol that, like DNS, can beset even the world\u2019s biggest companies<\/a>). Because DNS relies on distributed servers around the world \u2014 many offered by internet providers and networking providers \u2014 new DNS settings can take anything from a few minutes to hours, sometimes days, to fully propagate globally.<\/p>\n Square did not say more about how the DNS issue went down, and a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n In 2021, Notion experienced a DNS issue that saw the note-taking app fall offline for several hours<\/a>, prompting the company to tweet at its web host for help. Months later, an outage at Akamai \u2014 a major provider of DNS services \u2014 was hit by an outage<\/a>, causing a knock-on effect to some of the world\u2019s biggest sites, including banks and airlines.<\/p>\n That said, cyberattacks targeting DNS services are not unheard of. In 2016, several enormous waves of junk traffic targeting internet giant Dyn knocked the company\u2019s DNS servers offline<\/a>, effectively taking down Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify, and other major online sites that relied on Dyn\u2019s services. The cyberattack was caused by a huge botnet of hijacked internet devices ensnared by the Mirai malware.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n