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Visa outage: payment chaos after card network crashes – as it happened | Business | The Guardian

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"Visa says the widespread outage which affected customers in the UK, Europe and abroad was caused by a ‘hardware failure’ and was not the result of unauthorised access."

From "Visa outage: payment chaos after card network crashes – as it happened | Business | The Guardian".

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I was caught up in the great Visa disaster of 2018 just the same as everybody else was. I walked into a store bought something and tapped my iPhone on the terminal and was completely shocked to see a message along the lines of “declined”. At the time I just assumed usual levels of incompetency at either the acquirer or the issuer and reached into my bag for another card. This happened to be a MasterCard and it worked perfectly.

 It was only a little while later that the Twitter sphere alerted me to the nature and extent of the calamity. The Visa network was, according to frontline reports, down. I checked with some colleagues who have all of the necessary test jiggery-pokery and they told me that the network wasn’t there at all was not down and that authorisation messages were reaching the issuers. After that, no one knew what was going on and no authorisation responses were making it back through the network to the terminals. Thus, the terminals didn’t get an authorisation and declined the card but the charge was registered by the issuer. The issue was didn’t know anything was wrong because they were sending back appropriate authorisation responses.

 

Sure enough, I looked at my phone and my Visa credit card was indeed showing the charge that had been declined. I assumed this point that there would be complete chaos (I was right) and then it would take enormous amounts of hassle to unwind. You can see why: my issuer thinks that the merchant got the positive response and has debited my account, but when the settlement records don’t match those charges will have to be refunded

 

 

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"The core of the issue is identification and trust, not the payment instrument."

From "Some observations on Japan | Consult Hyperion".

 

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If I had been in charge at the Waitrose round the corner, I would have told the staff to ring up the transactions as cash, put a post it note in the till with with card number, expiry date and amount and then paid the staff overtime for manual keying after the store closed. Then I’d knock the cost of the overtime (and any transactions declined after manual entry) off of the bill from my acquirer and tell them to get the money back from Visa. That way there would a very slight delay for customers on check out but no real disruption and no abandoned shopping trolleys all over the place.

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