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Is VISA down everywhere in the US?
I was just told in the supermarket card payments are down in -all- supermarkets in my neighborhood. The internet doesn't seem to know much about it yet.
- slater 4y agoLooks like it: https://twitter.com/search?q=visa+down&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=visa+down&f=live and https://downdetector.com/status/visa/ https://downdetector.com/status/visa/
- deathanatos 4y agoOver a half dozen of those tweets are just parroting this HN post. Perhaps VISA is down, perhaps it isn't, but there's a lot of noise in the signal.
- slater 4y agoYeah, bots be a thing on Twitter :)
- KennyBlanken 4y agoSearch for 'credit card down' and you'll see very widespread reports of machines being down at Lowes, Shoprite, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Circle K, Home Depot, Whole Foods are just a few of the brands I've seen multiple twitter users mention, and the places being mentioned are across the country. The Toast system is down, too. Lots of people tweeting at company brands complaining that they can't accept cards. Lots of exasperated retail workers, too.
- yen223 4y agoThis is "citogenesis" in action: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- fingerlocks 4y agoHa! Great to know there is a word for this phenomenon. I encountered this first hand on the Wikipedia page “Substances Poisonous to Dogs” [1] subsection about Onions & Garlic. The only citation eventually self-references the same Wikipedia page from whence you started. I was already skeptical that the single most common vegetable and ingredient in human food was somehow poisonous to dogs, but now convinced it’s entirely made-up. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substances_poisonous_to_dogs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substances_poisonous_to_dogs
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoAmerican kennel club claims garlic is poisonous to dogs, if they eat several cloves per kg body weight... That's a lot of garlic.
- fingerlocks 4y agoWilling to bet a human being would get sick of they ate 200-400 cloves of garlic as well
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- readingnews 4y agoOdd, I just used a VISA. Hrm, probably should not say that out loud.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- killdozer 4y ago
- encryptluks2 4y agoYeah, let's just wait an hour or two for a transaction to finalize and pay a $50 merchant fee per transaction.
- m348e912 4y agoIt wasn't always this way :-/
- Scoundreller 4y agoYou know the miners control it all when they stopped including free transactions for aged coins (ie: most transactions used to be free).
- highwaylights 4y agoBecause the volume was almost zero, which it can handle. The volume now is (in relative terms) slightly above zero, which it cannot handle.
- cortesoft 4y agoRight, because it works fine at a smaller scale, but could never handle the transaction throughput that VISA handles.
- gbaygon 4y agohave you heard of lightning network?
- yebyen 4y agoWhere do you actually use lightning? Does it work for you most of the time?
- BrianOnHN 4y agoJust used a visa.
- candyman 4y agoFunny we were just at the supermarket and this was going on. I used my Amex and it went through fine. Lines everywhere, people rushing to the single ATM in the area. What's in your wallet? ;-)
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoCash.
- yial 4y agoIs it visa or is it various payment systems ? I know chase Paymentech is having an outage.
- 40four 4y agoNo, I’ve used my Visa cards multiple times today. Within the last few hours. Statements like that aren’t uncommon, when a store’s system goes down. I have no idea why they feel the need to exaggerate, or maybe they are just passing on here-say they got from their manger, without applying critical thinking. Maybe these things spread like the classic ‘telephone’ game. This actually happened to my friend at a festival a few weeks ago. He was told a similar statement, that the ’WHOLE’ Mastercard network was down across the country. Meanwhile it wasn’t, it was just their particular system. Really though, how would some random clerk know that information, in the middle of a shift. All they know is theirs is down.
- cmeacham98 4y agoIn this case, based on other commenters, there does seem to be something of a real outage (obviously not for the whole US though). However, as someone who has worked this style of job, I can describe why these fake outages happen: While 95% of people are understanding about this, some small portion of customers are unable to separate the store they're shopping at from the minimum wage employee they're talking to. If you say "our system is down" they'll berate you for this mistake and act like it's your fault despite that fact that you're a cashier that makes $10/hour and has no control at all over CC payments other than pressing a button on the register. It's not worth dealing with this so you lie about it being somebody else's fault: your internet is down or it's the card processor's fault.
- 40four 4y agoYeah that’s great point. That’s probably a very likely reason. It’s a good way to preempt any customers possibly getting angry at the employees or the business. Defer the blame to a tier above your control. I wonder if there is a term for that? I could see the same phenomenon happening other scenarios.
- j0hnny5 4y agoIt’s called an agent of limited authority. The cashier as an agent of the principal-merchant has limited authority to process transactions at the point of service, nothing more. When problems arise beyond that authority, they defer blame to the “tier above.” It’s a useful negotiating tactic.
- cachvico 4y agoWhy does this get to the front-page of HN is the real question..
- Melting_Harps 4y ago> Why does this get to the front-page of HN is the real question.. Fintech is a major part of tech, the question is why wouldn't it be? The VISA network relies on many intermediaries and it's bound to be affiliated with some clearing house that may have been undergoing maintenance on it's servers and sine thus is HN someone may be working on said maintenance. For what it's worth, I just used VISA to pay from my dinner in EU, and it went through no problem.
- przeor 4y agoI'm in Poland, why I waste time on reading this? downvotes from HN?
- true_religion 4y agoI’m not in Poland, but I would love to know if all payment processing was down in Poland because it would mean today I wouldn’t get paid by any of my Polish subscribers, and depending on the problem my payment intermediary might incorrectly mark the payments as failed and cancel the subscriptions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- joshribakoff 4y agoMany people don’t understand how card networks work. Generally there are many parties involved in a payment. There is an issuer (usually a bank), acquirer bank, the visa network itself, the payment processor company, etc. If peering between any of these entities is interrupted, there are sometimes “stand in authorization” that allows the card to continue to work, or people may assume the visa network itself is at fault even if it is not the issue per se. It’s possible (even likely) that a retailers payment processor is having issues in certain scenarios and the retailer just issues a blanket statement “visa is down” which is actually a misnomer.
- bokohut 4y agoThey are called "middlemen", having been one several times, and in the last few years as "fintech" has exploded the industry has become overrun with more and more of such companies that add little value outside of raking in high fees for the owners. Yes, there is even a movie about it. imdb dot com/title/tt1251757/
- kingnothing 4y agoLooks like Paymentech's (Chase) payment processing may be down. PARTIAL OUTAGE OCCURRED DATE : 2022-05-21 10:35:00 PST We are aware of an issue that is currently affecting transaction processing intermittently on the Paymentech processor. We are working to identify the issue as quickly as possible and have received confirmation from Paymentech that they are experiencing issues and are actively investigating, however they are unable to provide an ETA on resolution at this time. We will continue to monitor this issue and work with Paymentech until we have a confirmed resolution in place. Should you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact support at: https://support.authorize.net/ https://support.authorize.net/ https://status.authorize.net/#/dashboard https://status.authorize.net/#/dashboard
- KennyBlanken 4y agoAaaand it's gone. There isn't a single mention of it in the press, either. Huge portion of the US couldn't do credit card transactions for a few hours and...nothing. The best PR money can buy...
- rexf 4y agoAbout 4 hours ago today, I was trying to pay for food with my Chase card. It wasn't working even though I input the card information correctly. I strongly suspect it was related to this outage. For some reason, I was able to bypass the Chase issue by using Apple Pay (in app).
- codebolt 4y agoHad trouble with Visa today in Norway, but seems very strange that it should be related to something in the US.
- beAbU 4y agoNot just US. I had issues today in South Africa as well. At a couple of retailers, and I heard from friends about the same!
- dgeiser13 4y agoNo. Source: Am Visa.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoWent to a Cali burger today and their whole system was down, from the ordering kiosks to the automated fry cooking machines. But they had a swipe set up for credit cards that seemed to work ok (no ApplePay or chip/NFC).
- tyingq 4y agoIn the US, there's been a lot of supermarket consolidation over the years. For example, T̶o̶m̶ ̶T̶h̶u̶m̶b̶,̶ ̶A̶l̶b̶e̶r̶t̶s̶o̶n̶'̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶K̶r̶o̶g̶e̶r̶'̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶n̶y̶. My guess is this is a situation like that. The stores near you all picked the same company/tech to do credit card payments. Maybe because they are all owned by the same company.
- jdasdf 4y ago>For example, Tom Thumb, Albertson's, and Kroger's are all the same company. This is not true.
- tyingq 4y agoAh, yeah, I apparently missed with Kroger there. Market Street, Randall's, Von's, United, Safeway, Tom Thumb, and Albertson's are apparently the same company. See: https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/home/default.aspx https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/home/default.aspx
- onlyTokensOk 4y agoThey can still be different companies but choose the same provider regionally for their payment processing. There are many third party vendors that depend on this business to provide entry points for merchants to the VISA network.
- ipaddr 4y agoI thought this only happened to cryto. Bitcoin is still up and running todqy.
- ronsor 4y agoHow would crypto even go down?
- celticninja 4y agoI have seen a mcdonalds wide card payments issue, so it is not uncommon for a single retailer or geographic location to suffer these outages
- dieselgate 4y agoHappened to be at starbucks earlier in wa state and they said they’re not able to process credit card transactions at any locations. Not sure about visa specifically
- 3dprint4u 4y agoMicrocenter in oc California claiming debit transactions down.
- JDoubleA 4y agoHas this happen at a supermarket in PA, however, down the road at another store CC was non-issue. Perhaps only a supermarket issue?
- onlyTokens 4y agoI work for VISA. We were not informed of any outages that required tech org employees to come online. (Perhaps another region handled it, but usually it is communicated company wide) I suspect that a dependency client (Acquirer, Issuer Processor) had issues which caused the network to be down.
- onlyTokensOk 4y agoI work for VISA. We were not informed of any outages that required tech org employees to come online. (Perhaps another region handled it, but usually it is communicated company wide) I suspect that a dependency client (Acquirer, Issuer Processor) had issues which caused the network to be down.