Hi, I am having weird issues all of the sudden where my Sandbox calls to the Create Payment Link API is always returning 401: unauthorized. I have verified that my scopes are correct and the access token is not expired; this was not happening until today. Any ideas what is going on? Is this an issue on Square’s side or am I missing something?
Having the exact same issue starting today.
I’m experiencing exactly the same thing today, but before today it was working without any issues.
I’m getting this my first time setting up a sandbox and I tried everything I could think of on my end before coming here and seeing that others have been having this problem in this last hour. Bad timing, I guess. I’ll pull off the freeway and wait for the traffic to break before merging back into Square development. 
I have been getting this since about 18:50 UTC 16/07/2026
Thank you for flagging. We are looking into this now!
There was an intermittent outage that has since been resolved. Please try logging out and back in if you are still having issues.
I am still having the issue.
Still an issue. in the uk if that helps at all
Thank you, all! We are digging back into this.
Hi Ashley, I’m still having the same issue with my sandbox; 11am pacific, Canada
I’m still having the same issue; I’m located in Colombia, in case the location helps.
I’m still having the same issue, 24 hours later. Still trying. How do we escalate this? I’m in Northern California. 12pm 7/17/26
Stuff I’ve tried:
GET /v2/merchantsreturns the correct information for merchant id as well as location id
GET /v2/online-checkout/merchant-settings returns 500 INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR
POST /v2/online-checkout/payment-links returns 401 AUTHENTICATION_ERROR/UNAUTHORIZED for the same merchant
POST /v2/orders succeeds normally with the identical token/location
Token confirmed healthy via RetrieveTokenStatus with full scopes
We just shipped a fix for this can you try again now?
My sandbox looks to be working again!
It’s finally working again—thanks.
Thank you, that is looking fine now, appreciate your help
I’ve seen similar issues happen when everything looks correct on the app side. It may be worth generating a fresh access token and double-checking that the token is tied to the same Sandbox environment and application you’re calling from. If it started suddenly today, there’s also a chance Square changed something or is having a temporary Sandbox issue, so checking their status page or recent developer updates could help narrow it down.