Payment errors reported at some merchant stores from around 5:45 p.m.
Some stores still affected after midday restoration announcement
Toss Place says it is investigating overload cause as same issue hits select merchants
Toss Place, a subsidiary of the fintech firm Toss, suffered a second outage Friday in its store management and payment system "Toss POS," with disruptions striking during the dinner rush after an earlier lunchtime failure. Restaurants, cafes and other small businesses were left unable to process payments during peak trading hours, deepening frustration among merchants.
According to industry sources, posts began appearing around 5:45 p.m. Friday on online communities for small business owners, reporting that Toss POS had stopped working normally. Some stores encountered errors while processing orders and payments.
One merchant said the system had not been restored even after 7 p.m. and that they had not received any text message updating them on the recovery status.
Other users posted asking fellow Toss POS merchants whether they had received restoration notices and whether their terminals were functioning. Intermittent payment failures continued at some stores into the evening service period.
Toss POS had already caused a lunchtime outage beginning around 11:40 a.m. Friday, with some terminals displaying the message "a problem has occurred with the network connection." Toss Place said the system was restored to normal around 12:10 p.m.
The company said it had identified an overload in an internal data processing segment as the cause of the midday outage and was working to prevent a recurrence. However, some merchants reported that the lunchtime disruption had not been fully resolved, or that the same problem resurfaced shortly after.
A Toss Place official said the same issue that occurred at lunchtime had affected several merchant stores in the evening, adding that the company was responding to individual merchants on a case-by-case basis while working to identify the precise cause of the overload.
Toss POS is a point-of-sale system used by restaurants, cafes and other retail stores for order processing, payment handling and sales management. As of late March, it was installed at approximately 300,000 merchant locations nationwide.
Because payment systems are core infrastructure directly tied to store operations, observers warn that repeated outages during peak hours could inflict growing harm on small business owners and inconvenience consumers.
kwater@heraldcorp.com
