Square Plugin Broke Suddenly Yesterday

Hey there!

If you’ve already went through and reauthorized Square, then this kind of problem is usually caused by either a conflict with your theme or with another plugin.
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The best way to determine this is to:

• Temporarily switch your theme to Storefront
• Disable all plugins except for WooCommerce
• Repeat the action that is causing the problem

If you’re not seeing the same problem after completing the conflict test, then you know the problem was with the plugins and/or theme you deactivated. To figure out which plugin is causing the problem, reactivate your other plugins one by one, testing after each, until you find the one causing conflict. You can find a more detailed explanation on how to do a conflict test here.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I’m familiar with how to eliminate plugin conflicts (been using WP since 2007). ?? This is the third site I’ve built with WC and Square (and the Astra Pro theme).

Even though I have a detailed change log that shows me the time and day when updates were made on the site in question, I did go ahead and check all plugins that had been updated within 24 hours before or after I received the error from the Square plugin. (No theme updates during that timeframe.) I did not find any conflicts.

Once again, here’s what happened:

1) The Square plugin has been working on the site for months and has processed a few dozen orders. (I do not use it to synch products with Square; that feature is turned off; I have only one location–online–as all POS events have been cancelled for the foreseeable future.) The last order processed was on Nov. 29 and I used WC shipping on Nov. 30. No known errors, no notifications of errors, everything worked as it should.

2) On the afternoon of Dec. 2, I suddenly got an email from the site notifying me of the following: “There was a problem with your Square Access Token
Heads up! There may be a problem with your connection to Square. In order to continue accepting payments, please disconnect and re-connect your site.” When I logged on to the site admin, there was a banner with the same message at the top of the dashboard pages.

3) I immediately disconnected and re-connected several times but the “heads up” banner remained. I checked the logs and posted the error I found to this board.

4) Since then, I have: attempted to disconnect and reconnect multiple times; double-checked all addresses and so on to be sure everything matches; repeatedly searched this issue on Google; eliminated any possible plugin conflicts (even though it seems far more likely that the issue is the newest version of the Square plugin and not some other plugin that was updated days before or after I received the error); and switched back to sandbox mode and run a test order (twice). So far, the “heads up” banner remains.

Note: when I researched this issue (this time and when I had a similar issue on another site months ago–that I was never able to solve, btw), I found many posts reporting the same scenario: the Square plugin randomly stops working every so many months and disconnecting and reconnecting does not solve the problem. Some people even said they just started ignoring the banner because they knew from experience that their site would still process orders and the banner wouldn’t go away no matter how many times they disconnected and reconnected. I’m wondering if there’s something somewhere I need to clear or refresh or delete?

Otherwise, I am stumped. As it stands right now, I have a WC site that was working fine until Dec. 2 when something interrupted the connection with Square and I have not been able to get it reconnected correctly since.

Thanks.

Hi there @azwp,

I’m sorry to hear about your experience with Square extension!

> Your request did not include an Authorization http header with an access token. The header value is expected to be of the format “Bearer TOKEN” (without quotation marks), where TOKEN is to be replaced with your access token (e.g. “Bearer ABC123def456GHI789jkl0”).

From my experience, this particular error occurs in the following cases:

– Sucuri Security - Auditing, Malware Scanner and Hardening: by Sucuri Inc plugin and Automatic Secret Keys Updater feature. This feature is updating salts once per week. Salts are used as part of the encryption process for tokens and so this weekly change can cause the trouble. Disabling this feature helped in a few cases I saw.

– Plugin/theme conflict. Square access token and refresh token are sent as URL parameters, so it’s possible that another plugin or theme file is modifying these values before Square is able to store them and connect.

For the next steps can you please:
– disable all plugin and switch your theme to Storefront
– try to reconnect Square
– check the logs

Please get back to us if the issue persists after a full conflict test.

In that case, we’d need to log in to your site and check what’s happening because we can’t replicate this error with the latest Square version. This is when we typically ask to submit a ticket: when a problem needs to be looked at closely and can’t be easily resolved without logging in.

Cheers!

Hi there @azwp,

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.