Bug in Terminal API (Create terminal checkout TIMOUT but the hardware start to make payment)

Questions
1

Dear Square Support team.

We are a Square Partner, providing Square service to our merchant using Square Terminal API with our POS System.

I am contacting because we found the Square Terminal API is quite unstable recently.

The most terrible problem is when we call “Create terminal checkout” API, it returns with “timeout error”, however the Square Terminal Hardware actually stars making payment.
Since the “create terminal checkout” API said “TIMOUT”, our POS system stopped handling the payment. But the users can still pay on Square Terminal. It cause the user paid successfully but our POS System no nothing about this situation.

This problem has occurred frequently since January this year. We do think this is a CRITICAL BUG. If the the create checkout API timeout, it should not make the Square Terminal to start making payment, isn’t it?

Kind Regards

2

Whats your application ID and do you have a checkout_id or a payment_id that this happened with? :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
3

Thank you for replying.

Is it save to share App ID publicly? If possible I’d like to send the App ID privately to you.

Here is an example error we’ve got:

After we called square.create.checkout API,
the API response the error below directly, but still made Square Terminal to start making payment.

{
"errors":
[
{
"code":
"INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR",
"detail":
"An internal error has occurred, and the API was unable to service your request.",
"category":
"API_ERROR"
}
]
}

After user finished the payment, we get webhook callback from Square Server,
The code below is part of the callback data:

"location_id":"LEYPE5WET5Q5X",
"note":"??????? ord_64aad8745db68f653e7e9a4",
"order_id":"DKD0XekPEIoHZSUQmz6Mi24eV",
"reference_id":"ch_7b114aef7441c486a4d1080",
"source_type":"CARD",
"status":"COMPLETED",
"updated_at":"2023-02-24T03:54:59.997Z",
"version":3

Since we’ve got an error or a timeout when creating checkout, our system will not handle the webhook, the payment by the user just get dropped. Which is a critical problem for our business.

We’ve got this problem at about a one-thousandth ratio, but still too much to us since we handles thousandth payment a day.

Please check this for us as soon as possible. Thank you.

4

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’ve escalated this to the team. Also the application ID is safe to share publicly. Only the access token should never be shared. :slightly_smiling_face:

5

Thank you! Our App ID is: sq0idp-vFjhPR7Dx-K-aCmvwuQj1g

6

Dear @Bryan-Square

Is there any update about this issue? Since our customers still occasionally encounter this problem, it would be appreciated if any expected fix time can be shared. So we can share the time with our customers too.

7

Are they consistently getting the error? I only see one in the last 28 days in the API Logs. :slightly_smiling_face: