They're saying if you need more reliability than a service provides, but choose the cheap option with too low(or no) SLA, then you screwed up.

As a former POS engineer, this has been my gripe about these services from the get-go. Real payment processors, and POS software/SaaS vendors you... pay for guarantees about stuff like this, and have clear workarounds. Does it screw up sometimes? Yea. But you don't get opaque downtime like this, and you were given a clear workaround(and ALWAYS a clear offline mode you wont get locked out of flipping on, like the case here) in the first place.

This is a failure both on the customers side, and on squares side. They basically scaled a pickup truck up to a delivery truck without considering why a delivery truck was designed differently in the first place, at least in some ways.