It's not so much an issue with Square as it is with their providers. The base problem sounds like it's with Ormuco/Tata. Ormuco's MPLS circuits aren't robust enough to run the traffic they are getting reliably. The good news is, the fix times are extremely fast on this as it costs Ormuco money and more importantly, their reputation. Providers are quick to stop gap these issues because some ISP's can re route you around their data centers completely. The same goes for Tata. Their ports are seeing tons of slowdowns as well.

I would imagine the reason for the long maintenance on Wednesday is for Tata to upgrade their racks (physical additions or allocation and synchronization of existing partitions) and for Ormuco to upgrade their MPLS circuits.

I would imagine when the bandwidth issues were surfacing, the System Admins for Square were the first on the phone talking to them trying to alleviate the congestion. That they have to talk to two completely separate companies is by itself challenging. That coupled with the language barriers (Japanese, French, English) makes a complicated situation exponentially more complex and time consuming.