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The fact that a credit card CAN have an outage is ridiculous. They were invented as an eventually-consistent system first! Just save up the credit card info, an

The fact that a credit card CAN have an outage is ridiculous. They were invented as an eventually-consistent system first! Just save up the credit card info, and charge the bank when the network connection is back up.

zinekeller 3y ago
It no longer works that way in Europe (or basically anywhere outside the US): most customers and banks insist that they see payments in real-time (in the name of fraud prevention (user-controlled credit card locks are a thing here) and convenience).
- steelframe 3y ago
  > () (()) Totally off-topic, but I challenge you to try writing without using any parentheses. They generally don't contribute positively toward either the legibility or impact of your prose.
lxgr 3y ago
This capability is actually built deeply into the chip payment specification used by most credit and debit cards, but it's fallen out of fashion in favor for online-first processing: The original motivation for offline capabilities was that phone calls were expensive in Europe (early terminals worked via dialup modems, which were also slow to connect), and phone lines were not ubiquitous in all stores. Now that that's been solved, just keeping everything online-only is much less of a headache for the card issuer, but it does suffer from greatly reduced availability in case of outages such as the one you mention: No overdrawn accounts, lost/stolen cards can instantly be blocked, PIN verification becomes much easier etc. That said, merchants are still free to accept any card offline – they just bear the full risk of that card being overdrawn or lost/stolen. And in case of a publicly visible outage, you can absolutely expect fraudsters to start showing up at the checkout in large numbers and with full shopping cards bearing lost and stolen credit cards. I really hope we'll see it make a return, if not for credit and debit cards then for the various upcoming CDBC projects. Not being able to purchase anything in case of a power outage or cyberattack is a huge risk to society and can even be actually dangerous in some cases (imagine e.g. a small unattended card-only gas station – not that uncommon in the US!)
- 7952 3y ago
  The original implementation of credit cards was paper based. You made a carbon copy of the bank card and a signature taken. And the pin can be verified using the card alone.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Smaller places in the USA will still bust out the carbon copy machine during outages, but they then have to bitch at the processor to get lower fees (often the fees are higher for non-instantly verified transactions).
    - lxgr 3y ago
      That can't be true anymore, at least not the carbon copy part: None of my US credit cards are even still embossed in the way necessary for them to work in these. Merchants can just note down the card number and manually charge it, though. I've definitely had that happen in the past somewhere. The downside is that the merchant is fully on the hook for chargebacks for such payments.
RoyalHenOil 3y ago
I completely agree. When I worked as a cashier, we had no problem letting people pay with credit cards even in the event of a full-on power outage. We just used a credit card imprinter, which was quick, cheap, and easy to use. Why has this suddenly become so difficult? It's not like outages are rare.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Outages are short and rare enough that newer cashiers may never have seen the imprint machine (and the store, if it has one, it’s probably buried in customer service somewhere). Where outages are more common it’s more likely people have workarounds - kind of like how when there was a power failure and the power company told the local store it would be 4+ hours to recovery they declared “discounted dairy”.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Modern cards aren't always embossed anymore. Most payment networks still have offline and eccentric ways to make a transaction, but it all comes down to one thing: If you don't do the most modern, 100% online method of credit card processing, you will be on the hook for any and all fraud, including fraud you can prove was fraud, and it usually costs more. It's just cheaper to say "Sorry nothing we can do"

zinekeller 3y ago

It no longer works that way in Europe (or basically anywhere outside the US): most customers and banks insist that they see payments in real-time (in the name of fraud prevention (user-controlled credit card locks are a thing here) and convenience).

steelframe 3y ago
> () (()) Totally off-topic, but I challenge you to try writing without using any parentheses. They generally don't contribute positively toward either the legibility or impact of your prose.

lxgr 3y ago

This capability is actually built deeply into the chip payment specification used by most credit and debit cards, but it's fallen out of fashion in favor for online-first processing: The original motivation for offline capabilities was that phone calls were expensive in Europe (early terminals worked via dialup modems, which were also slow to connect), and phone lines were not ubiquitous in all stores. Now that that's been solved, just keeping everything online-only is much less of a headache for the card issuer, but it does suffer from greatly reduced availability in case of outages such as the one you mention: No overdrawn accounts, lost/stolen cards can instantly be blocked, PIN verification becomes much easier etc. That said, merchants are still free to accept any card offline – they just bear the full risk of that card being overdrawn or lost/stolen. And in case of a publicly visible outage, you can absolutely expect fraudsters to start showing up at the checkout in large numbers and with full shopping cards bearing lost and stolen credit cards. I really hope we'll see it make a return, if not for credit and debit cards then for the various upcoming CDBC projects. Not being able to purchase anything in case of a power outage or cyberattack is a huge risk to society and can even be actually dangerous in some cases (imagine e.g. a small unattended card-only gas station – not that uncommon in the US!)

7952 3y ago
The original implementation of credit cards was paper based. You made a carbon copy of the bank card and a signature taken. And the pin can be verified using the card alone.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Smaller places in the USA will still bust out the carbon copy machine during outages, but they then have to bitch at the processor to get lower fees (often the fees are higher for non-instantly verified transactions).
  - lxgr 3y ago
    That can't be true anymore, at least not the carbon copy part: None of my US credit cards are even still embossed in the way necessary for them to work in these. Merchants can just note down the card number and manually charge it, though. I've definitely had that happen in the past somewhere. The downside is that the merchant is fully on the hook for chargebacks for such payments.

RoyalHenOil 3y ago

I completely agree. When I worked as a cashier, we had no problem letting people pay with credit cards even in the event of a full-on power outage. We just used a credit card imprinter, which was quick, cheap, and easy to use. Why has this suddenly become so difficult? It's not like outages are rare.

bombcar 3y ago
Outages are short and rare enough that newer cashiers may never have seen the imprint machine (and the store, if it has one, it’s probably buried in customer service somewhere). Where outages are more common it’s more likely people have workarounds - kind of like how when there was a power failure and the power company told the local store it would be 4+ hours to recovery they declared “discounted dairy”.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Modern cards aren't always embossed anymore. Most payment networks still have offline and eccentric ways to make a transaction, but it all comes down to one thing: If you don't do the most modern, 100% online method of credit card processing, you will be on the hook for any and all fraud, including fraud you can prove was fraud, and it usually costs more. It's just cheaper to say "Sorry nothing we can do"