Visa card network crashes

[k@suy]

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.

Maybe since wr dont know the real reason.Of course the spokesman will say good words as he speak. I read somewhete that  credit card debt payment is declining,  hope crypto is not the culprit But if these financial institution fails,crypto had great role to pla.

[sandisunny]

In as much as the world is moving towards cryptocurrency and cashless policy, we cannot deny the fact that paper money is still the best, reason being that it doesn't get affected by network. Lets take for example you are with your family on a outing and all you have on you is your debit or credit card, then you want to pay the bills and you swipe your card through the POS and bingo it reads network failure, that will one of the most embarrassing moment of your life but if as at that time there is some physical cash with, you wouldn't think twice to pay. To me cashless policy is good because of security but physical cash safes a lot of embarrassment.

[Taki]

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.

To have the most cash at home seems good, cause of you are kinda protected from all those things which may happen with your bank. But it may play bad joke with you, someone can gossip such secret and one day you and your house can be roughly grabbed.
I like to have money on the card, this way I feel free myself and those money do not burn my pockets so much with annoying 'use us, use us All!'

[Uno17]

If it happens that visa card network crashes, everyone is confident enough that it would be reconstructed right away because it has been tested already for many years they made an accurate functions. Therefore the committe is already prepared and established more preventions on failure cases i think. Therefore when malfunctions and failures occurs, i am positive they can make an easy solution to correct everything.

[Btcschool]

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.

I’m not in support of having a cashless society, neither am I in support of having a society where we will only have physical money. Just like they say, two will always be better than one. We need both electronic forms of carrying out money transfers and we also need the physical ones. Electronic forms of transaction makes it easier for us to transact money from one location in the world to another without any waste of time.

[Palmerson]

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.

This always happens. Any promising project always has an alternative. The Visa has a MasterCard. Bitcoin has a lot of altcoins. But any such failures create problems for a certain number of users. It's inevitable. There is nothing perfect in the world.

[Lagrood]

Every company might encounter with a hardware failure and it does not mean that Visa is a bad company which we should not trust anymore. I consider that Visa is one of the leaders of plastic card payments and there is no objective reasons to assert that Visa is obsolete absolutely because anyway its tech are widely used.
I agree with your thoughts that people need to have a much better payment system which can be implement using crypto tech but there is one big problem crypto tech are not widely used for a while I mean that we cannot buy food in a store paying with BTC, for example, and it is a pity but I am sure that the situation will be changed soon in the better way.

[joeperry]

I think this is just some examples of failure but mostly digital currency works more secure and fast also. A person cannot manage all his money in cash he needs some digital support to store it so in the same way we can say the digital currency is very important for proper management and safety of our wealth.

[robertkamerer]

I don't see why we have to choose between two worlds here. I can totally see both crypto and cash coexisting in the future.

[drm]

I think this is just some examples of failure but mostly digital currency works more secure and fast also. A person cannot manage all his money in cash he needs some digital support to store it so in the same way we can say the digital currency is very important for proper management and safety of our wealth.

More secure for what? Transactions going through and the network going down?
A decentralized system cannot roll back transactions like they can with their centralized system, something that is needed for offering refunds and combating theft.

[1Referee]

I agree with your thoughts that people need to have a much better payment system which can be implement using crypto tech but there is one big problem crypto tech are not widely used for a while I mean that we cannot buy food in a store paying with BTC, for example, and it is a pity but I am sure that the situation will be changed soon in the better way.

It will likely take years before we can see Bitcoin and basically any other crypto to become more of a currency.

We need to get rid of the destructive overall greed focused mindset, and also get rid of Bitcoin's massive long term potential. The higher the price is, the less speculation there will be when it comes to even higher increases. At some point there will be a limit, and that limit will help make Bitcoin the currency that everyone wants it to be.

I don't see why we have to choose between two worlds here. I can totally see both crypto and cash coexisting in the future.

That's it, we have an option now. Good thing that comes from this is that Visa & Co never had any real competition, which allowed them to legally extort people as key players, and that has changed now. All financial institutions will eventually have to compete with crypto in order to offer the people the best and cheapest possible service.

[stompix]

That's it, we have an option now. Good thing that comes from this is that Visa & Co never had any real competition, which allowed them to legally extort people as key players, and that has changed now. All financial institutions will eventually have to compete with crypto in order to offer the people the best and cheapest possible service.

And with what has Visa to compete right now?
Contactless payments take 5 seconds, it's pure miracle if I can get a block confirmation in that timeframe.
Fees? I pay 0 fees for both my debit card and my cc, 0 fees on ATM withdrawals and 0 on the mobile app (this is from the bank so guess it's not VISA).

So, what has BTC to offer so that I would choose BTC over Visa?
We're talking about cards vs bitcoin, don't give the international money transfer stuff...
Compared to daily usage for food and other merchandise, those are a drop in the ocean, I don't think I've made more than 5 of them my entire life that were not, ironically, SEPA withdrawals from exchanges..

Bitcoin needs speed, lightning speed to even have a chance of taking on plastic cards.

and that has changed now.

Nope, it hasn't. It will, but it's going to take a lot of time...too much for some of us.

[Cassy14]

Visa and Mastercards like other third parties,
those are the company that will explore and expand cryptocurrency.
they will produce the power to escalate everything.
promise they are one of the source to expand!

[Sowik]

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.

Yeah, with Bitcoin you are the one in control of your money but the bad thing is that you are not the one controlling the Bitcoin price.

[rosemary4u]

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.

It is not a surprise that a crash can happen on the VISA network. There are not perfect systems in the world of crypto  so bad things like a crash can always happen. Even with paper or fiat currency, there are many challenges such as counterfeits which is prevalent in many parts of the world.

[JohnBitCo]

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.

Maybe since wr dont know the real reason.Of course the spokesman will say good words as he speak. I read somewhete that  credit card debt payment is declining,  hope crypto is not the culprit But if these financial institution fails,crypto had great role to pla.

At the back end of credit / debit cards are the fiat currency and it is never been the true digital mode of payment. Bitcoin will eventually replace all these cards and banks and will introduce truly digital financial system.

[awik p]

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.

Maybe since wr dont know the real reason.Of course the spokesman will say good words as he speak. I read somewhete that  credit card debt payment is declining,  hope crypto is not the culprit But if these financial institution fails,crypto had great role to pla.

At the back end of credit / debit cards are the fiat currency and it is never been the true digital mode of payment. Bitcoin will eventually replace all these cards and banks and will introduce truly digital financial system.

at least the visa card introduces us to a more practical way of dealing without carrying cash. even so, indeed a visa card is a modification to step into the digital world, and after that bitcoin appears, which makes the government think of placing it in daily use, in fact they know, but are not ready to provide space

[charlotte04]

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.

There will always be some problems in anything. I know that Visa would find a way to fix their systems and eventually everything will be okay.

[jjjfff]

Fees? I pay 0 fees for both my debit card and my cc, 0 fees on ATM withdrawals and 0 on the mobile app (this is from the bank so guess it's not VISA).

Rest assured the fees are embedded somewhere. Either the merchant is paying them (and it's likely embedded into the price) or some other bank fee is making up for it.

[Santoshi_my_God_]

I don't see why we have to choose between two worlds here. I can totally see both crypto and cash coexisting in the future.

It is just the about the potential of the crypto and the fiat business. We try to do the comparative analysis and we see that crypto in this case leads the race because the world is slowly and gradually moving towards the globalization and the technological phase.