Visa card network crashes

[Hydrogen]

Firm apologises to millions left unable to pay for goods and services across UK and rest of Europe

Visa’s payment system is operating at “full capacity” after a hardware failure affected customers in the UK and the rest of Europe on Friday.

A statement posted on the Visa Europe website in the early hours of Saturday said: “Visa Europe’s payment system is now operating at full capacity, and Visa account holders can now use Visa for any of their purchases and at ATMs, as they normally would.”

The issue was not associated with any unauthorised access or cyber-attack, the statement said.

Millions of people were left unable to pay for goods and services across Europe after the unprecedented crash, which began at around 2.30pm.

Visa apologised late on Friday, saying it had fallen “well short” of its goal to ensure cards worked reliably at all times.

Major retailers had earlier confirmed that card purchases were failing. Queues built up at petrol stations and shopping was left at supermarket tills as customers were unable to pay.

Lisa Eagleton-Muir, 44, who had come to London to audition for the Great British Sewing Bee, could not buy any food at King’s Cross station for her return rail journey to Newcastle.

“I’ve only got two cards and they’re both Visa. I tried to buy my tea in M&S and a cafe but they were both rejected. I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s a long journey home with no food.” She later found she could withdraw money from a cash machine.

A spokesman for the supermarket chain Asda said some payments had gone through but others had not.

“When you try to pay something, it sends a message to Visa and then Visa have to send a message back to the chip and pin machine to say this is OK and then the banks are in between at some point. The message that is coming back to the chip and pin, that is where the fault is,” the spokesman said.

It is understood the Bank of England immediately contacted Visa to find out when its system would be back up and running. One banking industry source said: “There is never a good time for the payments system to go down but a Friday afternoon, when there is a flood of people leaving work, must be among the worst.”

In Spain, the Guardia Civil sent a tweet aimed at reassuring those affected by the system failure. Beneath a picture of Johnny Depp as a shocked Captain Jack Sparrow, the force said: “Stay calm. If you can’t pay it’s not because you’ve been robbed or hacked. Visa is suffering a service crash in Europe that’s stopping payments going through in its cards.”

Bank customers in the UK were still able to obtain cash from ATMs, which led to large queues forming at cash machines.

The Visa spokesman said on Friday: “The issue was the result of a hardware failure. We have no reason to believe this was associated with any unauthorised access or malicious event.”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jun/01/visa-card-network-crashes-and-sparks-payment-chaos

This could serve as one example of why a cashless society may not be the best option to pursue. Paper money never "crashes" or suffers "hardware failure". The reliability, greater efficiency and lower barrier to entry, in terms of merchant gateways not being necessary to conduct regular business can all be advantages which are difficult to discount that are intrinsic to paper money.

It could also illustrate one area where bitcoin and crypto currencies have a distinct advantage versus other electronic forms of payment such as credit cards, which is to say: greater reliability and decreased downtime.

Consumers may not be able to purchase a cup of coffee with bitcoin but at least they can rest assured their payment network won't crash or be at great risk for credit card numbers being "hacked" in the way other payment networks are on a daily basis.

[pinkflower]

The lesson here is people should always have physical cash in their pockets. I also dont know why the cryptocurrency people, especially Bitcoiners, are so fast to jump in on this minor incident and say I told you so.

[Don Pedro Dinero]

Yeah, but how often do those incidents happens? Like every 20 years on average? This is the first one I’ve heard so far.

For me, that’s not the problem, it’s rather that if your number is a sequence of ones and zeroes stored in a bank, that bank or the government have the power to take it from you, whereas if you have bitcoin, (and you hold your private keys) you have the power. This is a clear advantage of bitcoin vs cash, because holding large amounts of cash at home to retain the power is impractical.

[maculeth]

this is tantamount to, if paper money has one danger of theft or robbery, digital money also has the same risk of hack, or system failure. and both also have their respective roots, but must remain there to stay together and walk side by side.
paper money for offline transactions, and digital for online transactions.

[First77]

Mastercard advertisement: There are somethings money cannot buy, for everything else there is Mastercard

[davis196]

Yeah, but how often do those incidents happens? Like every 20 years on average? This is the first one I’ve heard so far.

For me, that’s not the problem, it’s rather that if your number is a sequence of ones and zeroes stored in a bank, that bank or the government have the power to take it from you, whereas if you have bitcoin, (and you hold your private keys) you have the power. This is a clear advantage of bitcoin vs cash, because holding large amounts of cash at home to retain the power is impractical.

You have the power over your bitcoins,until someone steals your private key or you forget where you keep it.
In the EU,all bank deposits under 100,000 euro are guaranteed by the government.If you abide by the laws and pay your taxes,no government has the right to take away your money.If this happens,you can sue your government in the court.

[napi]

yes it seems that the existence of cryptocurrency cash and vias is not very used anymore because they prefer to use cryptocurrency.

[Sidiq SP]

indeed we know the advantages of this bitcoin from credit card and other in terms of security, but our common hope is this bitcoin can be used in every thing, including to just pay for coffee in small shop, getting ahead this may be done soon and we can enjoy the results and the facilities of this bitcoin

[shadyrifles]

According to Visa officials, the latest statement the outage was caused by hardware failure it wasn't malicious event. They also apologize to the customers for shorting out the issue. The payment system was back to normal after 5 hours of failure. Here is the link to the first article on Visa Hardware failure https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outage-payment-chaos-after-card-network-crashes-live-updates

[palle11]

This failures are normal. Even with the fiat system, the banks do have there own issues coming from network failures and congestion. Cryptos also have the hacking problems from personal wallet to exchanges.

[First77]

According to Visa officials, the latest statement the outage was caused by hardware failure it wasn't malicious event. They also apologize to the customers for shorting out the issue. The payment system was back to normal after 5 hours of failure. Here is the link to the first article on Visa Hardware failure https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outage-payment-chaos-after-card-network-crashes-live-updates

Just a scare

[LeGaulois]

I have been a "victim" of the VISA crash . Quite embarrassing when you're at the supermarket and no other payment method to pay...
6.5€ only in my pocket, I was in shame looking like I have no money on my account. I had to back at home to take a bank cheque... I couldn't get cash with the ATM machine.

[Rossy Akbar]

Well,  I think every single bitcoiners need to have a cash to purchase any single kinda thing, it's good when you have a lot of coins and try to invest or purchase all the things by coins but it doesn't mean you're not care about a cash either.  I just can't imagine how they can survive without a cash if they just use a crypto coins.

[timerland]

Exactly. How reliable is a centralized network is something that people need to ponder about. This is just a practical demonstration that even with the extensive countermeasures put in place by Visa to prevent these crashes, these things do happen.

Cash in this instance would be much more reliable. Even a decentralized network like bitcoin wouldn't have these issues.

This failures are normal. Even with the fiat system, the banks do have there own issues coming from network failures and congestion. Cryptos also have the hacking problems from personal wallet to exchanges.

Hacking problems still come from centralized platforms, like exchanges. If you use bitcoin as it is intended, with you having sole control over the private keys, these issues can easily be mitigated.

[richardsNY]

People keep complaining about Bitcoin being slow and expensive, but they don't understand that while Bitcoin in its current form might not be the perfect payment tool, it does everything way better than all other traditional payment services. The best feature in terms of it being a payment tool is that all transactions are final after their first confirmation, while CC payments and other service payments take 60-180 days to become final, and even then it can technically still be reversed. In other words, Bitcoin isn't slower, but actually faster with transaction settle times in mind. People don't appreciate Bitcoin enough, but it will come eventually.

[stompix]

I have been a "victim" of the VISA crash . Quite embarrassing when you're at the supermarket and no other payment method to pay...
6.5€ only in my pocket, I was in shame looking like I have no money on my account. I had to back at home to take a bank cheque... I couldn't get cash with the ATM machine.

Hmm, this one is weird.
Here the payments also went down but a guy before me tried to use the ATM in the shop and he managed to withdraw money. He did try after he got the cash to pay once more with the card thinking that maybe the issue was solved but the POS payment again didn't go through.

When I passed again by the store an hour later there were two queues, one inside for the merchandise and one outside for the ATM.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outage-payment-chaos-after-card-network-crashes-live-updates

Chip and pin transactions were affected, but ATM withdrawals were not. American Express and Mastercard were running a normal service throughout.

The best feature in terms of it being a payment tool is that all transactions are final after their first confirmation, while CC payments and other service payments take 60-180 days to become final, and even then it can technically still be reversed. In other words, Bitcoin isn't slower, but actually faster with transaction settle times in mind. People don't appreciate Bitcoin enough, but it will come eventually.

And why would the average customer care about that?
I use my contactless card, hold it for 3 seconds on the terminal, payment authorized an I walk away with my merchandise. I don't wait 60-180 days for the settlement, and just like 99.9% of the users out there I couldn't care less about their internal process.

[ylnar123]

The lesson here is people should always have physical cash in their pockets. I also dont know why the cryptocurrency people, especially Bitcoiners, are so fast to jump in on this minor incident and say I told you so.

That should be the first thing that we have to do when we are in this crypto. Not only physical money in our pocket but also saving our earned money in a bank while some are used as investment on the traditional way. We should learn how to divide our assets on different way so that we have more options in case something goes wrong on our other investments.

[Naficopa]

The lesson here is people should always have physical cash in their pockets. I also dont know why the cryptocurrency people, especially Bitcoiners, are so fast to jump in on this minor incident and say I told you so.

That's right, just what happens when you withdraw completely from physical cash. Governments are already talking a lot about it. Some countries like Sweden are already testing such solutions. Then such a failure of the payment card system can create a lot of problems.

[jseverson]

Yeah, but how often do those incidents happens? Like every 20 years on average? This is the first one I’ve heard so far.

Exactly. I see a lot of crypto people overreacting to this. I don't see this as a point towards Bitcoin because it can't even a handle a fraction of what Visa is handling at the moment. Visa does need to step up its game though.

I don't know about cashless not being a good idea because of occasional failures. It's certainly a big deal and is a massive inconvenience, but I imagine service providers are going to scale their efforts with the demands of society. If they can't afford a fuck-up, they'll take every step necessary, and more, to avoid one. I'm not saying they were lax, but Visa apparently "only" represents about 1/3 of all UK spending, so it's possible that they didn't think the stakes were high enough and that the downtime was completely avoidable.

I also completely agree that Bitcoin would be far more reliable, but it still has to prove that it can scale before that conversation even begins.

[audaciousbeing]

This could serve as one example of why a cashless society may not be the best option to pursue. Paper money never "crashes" or suffers "hardware failure". The reliability, greater efficiency and lower barrier to entry, in terms of merchant gateways not being necessary to conduct regular business can all be advantages which are difficult to discount that are intrinsic to paper money.

It could also illustrate one area where bitcoin and crypto currencies have a distinct advantage versus other electronic forms of payment such as credit cards, which is to say: greater reliability and decreased downtime.

Consumers may not be able to purchase a cup of coffee with bitcoin but at least they can rest assured their payment network won't crash or be at great risk for credit card numbers being "hacked" in the way other payment networks are on a daily basis.

This is one time I would have read about this and I dont think its enough to conclude that the cashless society is bad all together and we should go back to the era of carrying paper money all over the place. Today, I made a transaction to pay for an international application fee and i could do that with my card at sitting by my computer. I wonder what would have happen if I have to go to the bank, then queue and after that fill series of form with answering of questions that have been answered already. The amount of human time needed to do that can be channeled into something more productive.

No system is perfect but cashless is way more better and not that paper economy is being eradicated but discouraged to a large extent and be available for out of the blue situations like this. Moreso, I think its outright not spreading your risk for someone to have two cards and they are both for the same issuer which is what happen to one of the complainants in the article. Visa might be down, but MasterCard is working which means the cashless policy has not failed totally.