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Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe
- parvenu74 8y agoThe plug to support The Guardian by donating with your VISA card at the bottom of an article about the VISA network being down caused me to laugh out loud. #Ironic
- the_duke 8y agoLuckily, credit cards are really a second tier payment system in most of the EU. Country-specific (debit) cards and the international Maestro payment system are the primary way to pay, along with cash. Apart from online shopping, of course. But even there, you usually have other viable payment options. So it's probably not all that much chaos...
- martinald 8y agoNot in the UK, it's all mastercard/visa now.
- Filligree 8y agoVisa Debit, though?
- falcon620 8y ago"it's all mastercard/visa now" shows us he/she likely doesn't understand the vast difference between debit and credit cards. If anyone from the UK who does understand that difference would chime in, that would be helpful.
- makomk 8y agoIt's all Mastercard/Visa now in the UK, for both debit and credit cards - and I think Visa is probably the more common of the two these days. Debit cards are pretty much always Visa here and have been for about a decade now.
- falcon620 8y agoYeah, that's not helpful, I'm afraid. Also demonstrably incorrect. Amex is still operating in the UK, for example.
- makomk 8y agoThere is precisely one issuer of non-Mastercard/Visa credit cards in the UK - Amex - and they're not accepted nearly as widely. There are exactly five banks which issue Mastercard debit cards rather than Visa - Virgin Money, Citibank, Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank, and Metro Bank - and none of them are particularly major players. (I think it was down to three or less at one point; Virgin and Citibank only switched in 2015.) Santander and TSB have apparently announced they're planning to switch to Mastercard debit in the future but currently their customers have Visa debit cards too. Maestro is dead as a dodo here, and the old UK-specific Switch debit card system no longer exists. So in actual fact, people in the UK who're reliant on their debit cards are more likely to be affected by this than people with credit cards too, even if the cards are from the same bank - banks that issue Mastercard credit cards generally use Visa for debit cards.
- daledavies 8y agoYeah I've banked with 4 different people now in the UK and had visa debit cards every time. Anyway I got declined with my visa debit card earlier, tried another payment terminal in the supermarket and it worked fine.
- rahimnathwani 8y agoTransferwise recently started issuing MasterCard debit cards. I was surprised that (i) it's technically a debit card, unlike Revolut's card which is a prepaid card, and (ii) it's issued by Transferwise, not be some bank on their behalf.
- madjam002 8y agoMonzo and Transferwise both issue Mastercard debit cards
- 8y ago
- the_duke 8y agoWell, you won't be part of the EU much longer. ;)
- aldanor 8y agoSame in Ireland.
- johnflan 8y agoVisa Debit in Ireland too, now.
- tialaramex 8y agoMaestro is wholly owned by Mastercard.
- krona 8y agoVisa don't issue or distribute credit cards, banks do. I have 3 Visa cards, only one is a credit card.
- elthran 8y agoIn the UK they do
- krona 8y agoI'm quoting Wikipedia.
- tialaramex 8y agoNo, they don't. VISA just owns the network that makes all these cards work in lots of places. Banks issue cards.
- zhte415 8y agoVISA and MasterCard have their respective networks. The banks issue cards that operate on these networks with their branded logo and packages with benefits, some of which are provided by the credit card networks, and some from the issuing bank.
- DangerousPie 8y agoI'm not sure about "luckily". Sure, today it might be a good thing, but 99.99% of the time it's just a massive inconvenience.
- wila 8y agoThe european debit card systems are not comparable with how it works in the US. In the US I will use credit cards, because that is the better system down there. Over here in Europe, I'll hardly ever use a credit card. So yes, luckily.
- DangerousPie 8y agoThis is not true for all of Europe. Here in the UK everything works through Visa/Mastercard, whether it's your credit card or your normal "bank card" (debit card). I really miss this system every time I go back to continental Europe and suddenly have to carry around huge amounts of cash with me. Because nobody accepts cards, and even if they do it's usually only Maestro etc.
- TillE 8y agoContactless payments have finally rolled out in most discounters/supermarkets and drugstores in Germany, it's a godsend. Just tap the card and the receipt starts printing in 3-5 seconds. But yeah for other stores and restaurants, better have cash.
- mdekkers 8y agoevery time I go back to continental Europe and suddenly have to carry around huge amounts of cash with me. Because nobody accepts cards You must be going to the wrong areas in Europe. Literally, everywhere I go (France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands in the past 6 months alone) cards are accepted.
- sakisv 8y agoI was visiting Amsterdam (from the UK) about a month ago and I was quite surprised (and annoyed) to find stores, even supermarkets, that have gone cashless while at the same time they would only accept Maestro.
- the8472 8y agoMany online shops take SEPA direct debit, which may be superseded by SEPA instant payments in the near future.
- blensor 8y ago+1 for SEPA ICT. Once that's rolled out everywhere it is really going to challenge the established online payment systems in Europe. Last time I bought something in an Austrian online shop it offered me the "eps" option which redirected me to my own onlinebanking portal after logging in the payment had only to be confrirmed with a tan and the payment confirmation from the vendor was instant. Basically the same flow as paying with paypal but completely through my own bank
- thesimon 8y ago>Once that's rolled out everywhere it is really going to challenge the established online payment systems in Europe Disagree. Most of the German banks that have just announced SEPA Instant are charging 0.50€-2€/transaction. No way the retailers will manage to convince the customers to pay that. I think PSD2 with the Bank Account API (think Klarna/SOFORT) is the bigger challenger.
- blensor 8y agoOh. I did not know that. I assumed that all SEPA transactions below 15000€ will be carried out as ICT if both banks support it. Well it seems they found a way to screw us over with another random fee
- ryanlol 8y agoI don't think we live in the same EU. As far as I can tell "Country-specific (debit) cards and the international Maestro payment" are only common in a couple of really backwards countries.
- raphinou 8y agoWhat do you call really backwards countries? Seems maestro cards are used in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)
- Cu3PO42 8y agoChiming in from Germany. Our debit cards are branded "girocard", which is to my knowledge exclusive to Germany and mostly co-branded with either Maestro or V-Pay for international payments.
- zokier 8y agoFinland here. We transitioned away from national debit cards to Visas (and MC) about 10-15 years ago, I think these days we are almost exclusively Visa/MC. And practically nobody uses cash as primary payment method.
- gomox 8y ago10 euro-bucks says you're either from Austria or the Netherlands!
- krzyk 8y agoMost EU? It's first time I hear about country-specific cards. Or more specifically, all cards are country specific, they are issued by your bank which is in your country (and has country of issue language printed on it).
- ThJ 8y agoWould this be the reason why my DigitalOcean payment failed today?
- kalleth 8y agoIt isn't down. I work for a large e-commerce company and we're seeing ~10% decline rates, at most, on VISA cards only, and that's intermittent. Overall average decline rate is more like 1-3% when you factor in the intermittentness of it. Still not great, but not PAYMENT CHAOS and not a CRASH OF THE VISA NETWORK.
- mey 8y agoDo the bin's point to a specific bank group?
- kalleth 8y agoNo
- Artemis2 8y agoSame here — I work for an online payments company. We’ve been seeing a dip of 2–7 points for the past few hours across our network.
- sitepodmatt 8y agoI hope it's not the real poor one where status page updates takes an hour plus. .begins with S
- dreamfactored 8y agoContactless went down completely
- kalleth 8y agoTo be fair I can't comment on POS/in-person transaction rates. All I have visibility into is online purchases with VISA cards on our site.
- falcon620 8y agoWhen you say you're seeing 10% decline rates, is that out of your total transactional volume (which I suspect is the case), or just out of the subset of your customer who actually have bona fide Visa credit cards?
- falcon620 8y agoThis is one of IBM's flagship customers, isn't it? They're supposed to never go down.
- mkirklions 8y agoSomething about decentralization. Something about single point of failure. BITCOIN only 50% kidding.
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agodo we know that it was IBM's mainframes that went down, or some VISA software update, or something else?
- mtgx 8y agoWhat was that whole thing about a "cashless society" again? What happens when a major rival actually attacks your cashless society?
- yzmtf2008 8y agoYou build a better cashless society. We don’t go back to pre-PLC controlled industrial era just because they can be (and have been) attacked.
- kossTKR 8y agoYeah i don't know why people are downvoting you. A new Carrington event, which is actually long overdue, or an unexpected cyber attack from China which i also don't find impossible to imagine in the next decades and society is at an absolute standstill. Off course more important problems would probably arise before. But reflecting on the sustainability of microchip-society in times of outage is healthy. Crash, Bang and suddenly everyone is 3 meals away from slaying their neighbour.
- nickpsecurity 8y agoFrom what I read, the Carrington opportunities did happen but the Sun's blasts missed us too many times to do the damage. We got super lucky.
- sbov 8y agoIf you only stock 3 meals at once, you have a much more likely problem on your hands: natural disasters.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoSame reason I don't trust cash at all and only trade in goods, services, and jaunty tunes. The value of a dollar could disappear at any moment!
- frockington 8y agoYou also shouldn't be holding goods as those can be stolen and services can always be done cheaper. Jaunty tunes are the best investment one can make
- falcon620 8y agoThis is one of the reasons why every frequent traveller should carry credit cards from at least two different banks and two different credit card companies (like Mastercard and Visa).
- gargravarr 8y agoMy bank recently replaced my Mastercard credit card with a Visa one, despite being Mastercard for years. I also have a Visa debit card. You don't have control over this :(
- dageshi 8y agoYes and add to that some emergency cash. 500 USD in $100 bills is easy to carry along with your passport.
- falcon620 8y agoSure. (I've been carrying around 20 * 20 Euro bills. Larger denominations seem to be scary to people who aren't used to them.)
- gargravarr 8y agoWhat's the betting someone pushed something to production on a Friday afternoon and has now gone to the pub?
- krona 8y agoAt least to me, the fact this happens on a Friday evening suggests it's deliberate, precisely because nobody with any sense would deploy something on a Friday unless it's an emergency.
- falcon620 8y agoMaybe someone forgot the golden rule: fire people on Monday mornings. Never on Fridays.
- stingraycharles 8y agoI thought the MBA handbook said you were supposed to fire them on Friday to minimize the chance they go rogue?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- falcon620 8y agohttps://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/1387/know-best-days-of-the-week-to-hire-fire-and-do-evaluations https://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/1387/know-best-days-... That random site happens to agree with my kind of thinking, so I copied that content in here: "Fire on Mondays. This lets dismissed workers start looking for a job right away. Make job offers on Thursdays. If candidates need time to think, you can give them one extra day. If you give them the whole weekend, they may find another offer. Give good job reviews on Fridays. It sets the mood for a good weekend, which can be a reward in itself. It also prevents satisfied workers from "kicking back" for the rest of the week. Give poor job reviews on Mondays. This provides employees time to work out improvements during the week, instead of stewing about them all weekend."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ben509 8y agoAny thoughts why a system like Eagle Cash[1] couldn't be used more generally? Obviously this particular design is stored value, but that's just a limit the chip is tracking, there's no particular reason it couldn't be based on your credit limit. [1] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/fsservices/gov/pmt/eagleCash/eagleCash_home.htm https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/fsservices/gov/pmt/eagleCash...
- Keloo 8y agoHey people I suggest revolut.com Make it an alternative it deserve!
- nik736 8y agoHow is Revolut solving that specific issue?
- andrewshadura 8y agoIt's not. Except that the majority of the cards they issued are MasterCard.
- hmate9 8y agoIronically I found out about the visa outage when I tried to deposit into my Revolut :)
- Psilidae 8y agoThat seems like a really cool concept. But also way too free. How are they making money? Their privacy policy (which was hard to find) doesn't describe how they handle your transaction data, yet almost half of the policy is describing how they're going to collect and disclose (web) information for advertising.
- thesimon 8y ago>How are they making money? Raising money (around $350 million recently) to hire consultants to figure out a monetization policy.
- vxNsr 8y agoSeems that it's not gonna help at all: https://i.imgur.com/c0vf3wd.png https://i.imgur.com/c0vf3wd.png
- wil421 8y agoGlad I happen to be in Munich where cash is king otherwise I would’ve noticed. Using cash here has made me rethink my habits. Still no chance I will put down my AMEX. 6% cashback at Grocery stores, 3% at the pump, and 3% at the department store I shop at. Even if I carry a balance sometimes I made almost $700 back last year.
- distances 8y agoCashback is very US thing though, so using cash in Germany won't deprive you from that. There are some companies offering modest cashback in Europe too, but in my experience their cards are rarely accepted anywhere. Which is fine by me, I'd rather have lower prices to start with.
- thesimon 8y agoAmex is 0.5-1% cashback in Germany which is quite good. SME Visa/MasterCards still give around 1% in airline miles.
- distances 8y agoBut I think Amex is very rarely accepted -- I don't own one, but judging by the "we accept these cards" labels outside stores.
- thesimon 8y agoI guess it depends what you are optimizing for. Groceries is a quite big expense part for me, so REWE, Aldi and tegut in Germany are quite good for earning. Other expenses are traveling, where basically everyone accepts Amex. Starbucks accepts is as well, quite a lot of McDonalds and most fashion retailers as well. You probably can't survive on Amex alone, but at least in Germany there is a quite big chunk that you can cover.
- distances 8y agoInteresting, sounds like it is more widely accepted than I thought after all.
- steve_gh 8y agoI'm a Brit currently in France Can't get cash from any ATM right now using my Visa Debit card
- anoncoward111 8y agoIronically my credit card info literally got stolen at a restaurant last night and most of the purchases they tried to make were declined hahahahah Honestly, I really enjoy using my credit card. I can buy anything, anytime, online, the customer service department always resolves fraud quickly, and they even pay me to use the damn thing
- merinowool 8y agoThat works fine until people sleepwalk into cashless society and then someone from the government will think you are undesirable and delete your assets.
- usrusr 8y agoI do all my day to day in-person payments in cash, yet all my assets would be just as vulnerable to that kind of attack as those of a completely cashless person.
- greenshackle2 8y agoDo you suggest we keep savings in cash and physical bonds, stock certificates and gold ingots under the mattress? I pay cash often but even so I very rarely have more than $1000 in cash at any given time.
- crysin 8y agoWhich is smart because at least in the US there's a large portion of the country where police can use civil forfeiture to take your money, even if you are not guilty of any crime.
- merinowool 8y agoNot necessarily under the mattress but it is smart to diversify your liquid assets location
- anoncoward111 8y agoLook, I really despise the government too, but... ... FDR confiscated the gold lol. If they want something of yours, they will take it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
- bungie4 8y agoHa! Self-gloating. I cancelled my Visa just yesterday. Part of my self-imposed program to return to a simpler life. But it's some sort of weird Schadenfreude justification that it hasn't happened to me directly. I'm rolling my life back to the 1980's. :D
- CosmicSteve 8y agoIf a decentralized cryptocurrency platform could properly scale in the future, likely with a stable cryptocurrency for currency usage, then this scenario will become a thing of the past.
- gomox 8y agoIn all fairness credit cards have a much better reliability track record than any cryptocurrency.
- CosmicSteve 8y agoCurrently? Correct, hence I'm referring to a network properly scaling in the future. Ethereum currently has difficulties processing a image-based cat game, nevermind actual transactions.
- crazygringo 8y agoCurious, do credit card companies provide SLA's? If you lose x% of sales on a day due to customers not having alternative forms of payment... is there anything a merchant can do to recoup their losses?
- mkirklions 8y agoMerchants learn their lesson and look to alternative forms of payments... Like... BITCO apple pay/android pay
- s73v3r_ 8y agoIf the Visa network is down, those options wouldn't work either, would they?
- lutorm 8y agoIsn't this why you're supposed to be able to do the old hand-imprinted manual transactions? If they can't process the transaction, shouldn't they fall back to the manual option?
- joelhaasnoot 8y agoa) This isn't tested weekly b) I doubt any store actually has the forms/equipment/etc for this
- ams6110 8y agoSome cards don't even have the raised, embossed printing anymore, so the imprint method wouldn't work.
- gargravarr 8y agoAnd you can bet that even if they did, the staff wouldn't be trained in using it. Particularly true for large stores with high turnovers of young workers. Card machines going down is a one-in-a-million event.
- blensor 8y agoIt's not only the card network but also the infrastructure connecting the store to the card network. And the card readers themselves as well. I would say I am at least once a month in a store where, due to some incident, they can't accept electronic payments and have a sign 'card payments not working' on at least one checkout counter
- blfr 8y agoThis seems to have changed in the other direction. While I used to have flat, non-embossed cards in the past, all my cards today are embossed. That's despite never having a chance to make use of the embossing.
- hooch 8y agoMy bank stopped providing stationery for the imprinter many years back.
- Geee 8y agoIs it possible to DDOS Visa network? Maybe someone figured out a way and they're negotiating about ransom right now.
- wgyn 8y agoOne thing to note: Visa Europe and Visa are distinct systems[0] and were distinct entities until Visa Europe was re-acquired[1] by Visa in 2015. [0] Source: I used to work in payments [1] https://www.visaeurope.com/newsroom/news/vi-to-acquire-ve https://www.visaeurope.com/newsroom/news/vi-to-acquire-ve
- thesimon 8y ago>until Visa Europe was re-acquired[0] by Visa in 2015. Sadly. Visa Europe had some quite good policies such as banning ATM surcharges. It also made the payment sector seem a bit more european, now it's back to the US-duopoly. On topic: Visa Europe cards are denied when used in other countries outside of Visa Europe.
- arprocter 8y agoA few years ago my European Visa debit card wouldn't work in the US unless they ran it as credit. It always worked fine at US ATMs, other than the first time I informed the bank I was going overseas, which apparently they interpreted as 'please disable my card'
- krzyk 8y agoI used my European Visa debit card in USA few years ago without any problems.
- NullPrefix 8y agoOne time I've tested this feature and it works on my machine.
- thesimon 8y agoThe selection of Credit/Debit in the US is misleading, as it refers to either Visa/MasterCard (credit) or the domestic payment processing of US cards (debit). International cards always need to be ran as credit in the US, not matter if it is credit, debit or prepiad.
- subcosmos 8y agoI wish I got into conventional currency, back in the days when mining it was profitable. Like the Iron Age
- NullPrefix 8y agoPool mining is still profitable, although most of the pools aren't open to general public.
- hacker_9 8y agoYeah I just tried to pay with contactless at the Tesco self checkout, it failed and the security guard told me to enter my PIN instead. That worked, though I just checked my balance and see I've been charged twice for my shopping. Fuming.
- hamstercat 8y agoJust call your credit card issuer, they will remove one of the two. They may not be perfect, but they have good customer service.
- zubairq 8y agoNot all VISA transactions are protected. I had a scammer steal my credit card while watching my pin entered at a restaurant and then withdraw cash. The bank (Lloyds Bank in the UK) recfused to refund the money, even though there was video of the thief withdrawing the money
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoVisa Card Payments Failing in UK, Europe, Highlighting Need for Decentralized Options: https://cointelegraph.com/news/visa-card-payments-failing-in-uk-europe-highlighting-need-for-decentralized-options https://cointelegraph.com/news/visa-card-payments-failing-in...
- Havoc 8y agoHaha yeah. The scramble for “who has cash” was entertaining
- fwdpropaganda 8y agoSee, if only Visa would be running on the blockchain, none of this would happen /s