Visa Card Payment Systems Go Down Across Europe

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: The Visa card payment system is currently down across Europe. Users across the continent have reported problems during the day when attempting to make payments using their Visa cards. A Visa spokesperson confirmed the outage but did not reveal any other details, such as its cause or its scale. Bank social media accounts also confirmed the outage and informed customers of the issue. Users across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Romania, and Hungary have confirmed problems with payments, but the problems are believed to affect all European countries.

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I was going to suggest...

[Anonymous Coward]

And they want us to all go cashless with companies like Visa handling the transactions?

Re:

[Lunix Nutcase]

Why not? Do you have a payment network that can process in excess of a 100 billion transactions in a year?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesnt matter how many they process if reliability is a problem. This is the 6th major VisaNet outage in the UK since xmas. The system is not reliable no matter how much you want to pretent

Re:I was going to suggest...

[cayenne8]

Why not? Do you have a payment network that can process in excess of a 100 billion transactions in a year?

What if ALL the forms of electronic payment go down?

Cash doesn't depend on electrons flying between computers.

If nothing else, it is good as a failsafe method of transaction.

Go 100% cashless.....a good terrorist hit on the power grid, or even a bunch of banks, and you've fscked....

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Recently a major UK bank, TSB, botched a migration and people couldn't access their money for more than a week.

Thing is, even you go cash only, your employer won't be able to pay you and many places don't even take cash (online only accounts). If you want to buy a house with a mortgage the bank won't give you the money in a suitcase. And now you have to keep track of your balance manually too, and remember to make all those recurring payments every month or services start getting cut off and your car gets r

Re:

[novakyu]

And why are you exactly buying a house in an emergency situation? Nobody is suggesting going 100% cash---but there are foolish people out there that are trying to go 100% cashless.

(And I refuse to patronize any place, even a restaurant, that won't accept cash for reasonably small transactions, around $100 or less.)

Re:

[Agripa]

We have no fly lists so why not no money lists? There is no right to conduct financial transactions.

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[lgw]

Why not? Do you have a payment network that can process in excess of a 100 billion transactions in a year?

There was a time when ~3000 transactions per second was impressive. These days not so much.

Re:

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Perhaps their server crashed mining bitcoins....

You have no idea how much I wish I had mod points to mod that comment up. Maybe someone else will.

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[Lunix Nutcase]

Clearly not. The 3.2 billion VISA cards in use and the 111 billion global transactions worth $10.2 trillion that were processed by VisaNet last year is because no one uses a Visa card.

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[sabri]

See the pie charts on page 7 of this presentation.

You can't compare this with other countries. In Europe, most electronic payments are processed as debit, because credit cards are not so common as they are in the U.S.

In the U.S., you automatically get a debit card with your bank account. However, that debit card can also be run as credit (assuming you have sufficient balance). In that case, you don't need your pin code etc. In other words: your U.S. debit card can be run as both debit or credit. In (most) European countries, you'd have one debit card and

Re:

[cayenne8]

In the U.S., you automatically get a debit card with your bank account.

Not for me...last time they tried to send me an ATM card that doubled as a debit card, I sent it back with instructions that I wanted a card that was ONLY an ATM card.

With a proper credit card, if they get fraudulent charges, well, it isn't directly out of my checking account....with a debit card, it can not only take time to get the money back in after you prove it is fraudulent, but while that cash it out, other bills, etc can pile

Re:

[Lunix Nutcase]

Because Germany is the whole world?

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[jrumney]

And debit cards are purple. Who [techradar.com] do you think runs the biggest debit card network?

Good news!

[b0s0z0ku]

The more e-pay systems fail, the longer the goal of a cashless society is pushed back.

Re:

[jellomizer]

However usually after an outage. The IT Company will fix that problem so it doesn't happen again. Thus after every outage, the system normally gets more secure. Especially if an outage causes so much revenue loss.

Paper money and coins are not reliable as well. If I have a $100.00 bill, not all locations will take that large bill. Heck I remember when I was in college and I had a freaken $5.00 bill that I couldn't get broken up to singles. I even wen't to the campus post office, to buy a stamp, and they d

Re:Good news!

[Jahta]

However usually after an outage. The IT Company will fix that problem so it doesn't happen again. Thus after every outage, the system normally gets more secure. Especially if an outage causes so much revenue loss.

Except you can't guarantee 100% availability of any electronic system. There will always be scenarios that will take down at least part of the system; power outages, network outages, etc. Recently my local coffee shop's card reader terminal was down for a couple of days. Without the ability to accept cash they would have been unable to trade.

Paper money and coins are not reliable as well. If I have a $100.00 bill, not all locations will take that large bill. Heck I remember when I was in college and I had a freaken $5.00 bill that I couldn't get broken up to singles. I even wen't to the campus post office, to buy a stamp, and they didn't have change so they gave me the stamp for free. All I wanted to do is use the vending machine to get a Soda.

The cash in your pocket is about as reliable as it gets. Visa customers are being advised to use their cards to withdraw cash from their issuing bank's ATMs. It's only the retailers that have already gone cashless (and there are some) that will have a problem right now.

Re: Good news!

[powysbiker]

Contactless is the same as cash for thieves.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

All I wanted to do is use the vending machine to get a Soda.

All I wanted was a Pepsi!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

See? You got the reference but not the person who down-modded it. It was such a disgrace, how quickly I was replaced, I hope Mastercard is an excellent card.

Go Down

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Visa Card Payment Systems Go Down Across Europe

Thank goodness the headline said "Systems" rather than "Users". Otherwise, no one in Europe would be getting any work done today.

Re:

[arth1]

Basically only mom and pop stores don't accept AMEX, I have yet to find anywhere that has more that a few locations, that does not accept it.

You're probably American. TFA is about Europe, where few places except hotels, car rentals and other places catering to American tourists accept American Express. VISA, MasterCard and giro payments[*] are really the three options in Europe.

[*]: Transactions in mainland Europe are payer initiated, not payee initiated. This makes direct deposits to anyone convenient, with no need to keep banking information secret.

Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.

Personal information

[jfdavis668]

They were probably cut off for not handling personal information properly.

cashless society

[Reverend Green]

Go cashless now! Yeah!

---
This message brought to you by RCAD - Responsible Citizens for Anarchy & Disorder

If only there was some alternative...

[the_skywise]

So if the system crash you could still have a form of exchange to pay for services... Something that couldn't easily be copied or forged like metal or maybe certificates with highly detailed printing that could come in different denominations.

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[thegarbz]

Oooh I know the answer to this! Mastercard!

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[Anonymous Coward]

So if the system crash you could still have a form of exchange to pay for services... Something that couldn't easily be copied or forged like metal or maybe certificates with highly detailed printing that could come in different denominations.

I know you're joking but that's a too complex system and pointless overkill. Just imprint the card with the manual swiper like as been done basically since VISA was founded and is still done in parts of the world where the Internet isn't reliable. Let VISA take the risk. That's their entire business model.

Cash is dead for many, many reasons, not the least of which is it's expensive to produce, protect and maintain while offering no real benefits. Having all your money in cash that you can hold is no safer o

Re:

[Sejus]

Visa does not take the risk. If you are a vendor and accept payment from a declined card you eat the charge. We take offline payments in the restaurant industry when the internet goes down and if they are not approved we are not paid.

Re:

[ledow]

Nothing wrong with "never carry cash".

You have to be a dickhead not to have a backup of anything you rely on, though.

If you have a Visa, get a Mastercard too.

P.S. All the ATMs still worked, so you could... just get cash out.
P.P.S. It was mostly contactless that didn't work. Chip & PIN was fine.
P.P.P.S. Living day-to-day such that your dinner relies on you buying it now rather than "Oh, well, I'll have something else" is another "not enough redundancy" problem.

GDPR

[Tukz]

VISA probably forgot to respond to an GDPR e-mail and got cut off.

Chip + pin

[Typing_Ptarmigan]

One reason US credit cards have chip + signature instead of chip + PIN (like in Europe) is ostensibly because point-of-sale (POS) terminal data connections are intermittent in Europe, compared to POS terminals in the US. Chip + PIN can authenticate without the POS terminal being "on the net;" the POS terminal can "catch up" later when it does have connectivity. It'll be interesting to see why that strategy doesn't seem to be working (TFA currently mentions "payment cards with different payment technologie

Re:

[Milvuss]

I live in France. I have a VISA (chip+PIN) card since the start ot this century and never once had to pay cash because of a faulty POS terminal. Sometimes I had to try several time, but it's always was because the POS was slightly damaged (too many rough customers ?).

Impressive reliability I would tell.

Re:

[Sejus]

The PIN is not stored on the mag strip, it has to phone home. I am in the states and admin POS systems, they are all chip+pin and if the internet goes down we can either store the charge and eat it if it is declined or manually call for a approval which can take a while. We use the later on charges over 200$. (Fine dining)

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[jrumney]

Debit cards in Europe often contain a flag (and some used to have it printed on the card, but I haven't seen that for some time) saying they can only be used for online transactions, as there is no way to ensure the funds are available if the transaction is offline. I would be surprised if it was the case that data connections were more intermittent in Europe - I know there is a lot of very old infrastructure in Europe like 2000 year old sewers compared with the US, but telecommunications infrastructure is

POS terminal talks to VISA?

[rastos1]

I thought that the POS terminal talks to clearing center for the bank that issued the card. So normally if you have an account from a bank in your country, then it connects to the clearing center in that country. And the actual clearing happens in a relatively short window each night. Does the POS terminal actually talk to a VISA on each transaction?

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[Mr_Silver]

In short, no it doesn't work anything like that.

Have a read of this [arstechnica.com], more specifically the sections titled "four party model" and "What happens when you buy something".

Re:

[Typing_Ptarmigan]

Most POS terminals in the US use chip + signature so authorization is via "the net" and is done each time the VISA card is used. AFAIK, POS terminals in Europe use chip + PIN, authorization is handled without "the net," and reconciliation is done in a daily/nightly batch.

Re:

[Milvuss]

Depends of the amount. Small amounts do not need authorization. Big amounts almost always need it. And there is also some random checks from time to time. You can tell because the transaction is (slightly) longer.

Re:

[Milvuss]

I forgot to tell it does also depend on the card. When I was a student, I had a "Visa Electron", which always needs authorization, so I had to be careful in conventions and other venues without net.

Re:

[rastos1]

Yes, I should have mentioned that. I'm in Europe and the card is chip&pin (as is the case in most of EU, I believe). My main point still is: why the technical problems at Visa cause problems with payments in Europe? a) I assume that European chip&pin cards were affected. b) even if the authorization is done via "the net", doesn't that mean only "via network connection to the clearing center" and not "via network connection to Visa" ?

Re:

[jrumney]

I don't know what decade your bank is living in, but my bank clears transactions within seconds - I often get an SMS before the receipt has printed out.

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[rastos1]

Getting notification from the bank is one thing. Money disappearing from your account is second. And money appearing on the merchant's account is third.

In fact a friend of mine had a situation where the merchant forgot to complete the transaction within a month period and the money that was "locked" on friend's account became unlocked again. From a legal point of view - after lengthy discussion with the bank - my friend got the goods for free.

Re:

[Spy Handler]

For the most part yes, Europe is trying to make itself a cashless utopia. Except Germany (which happens to be the biggest country in Europe in terms of population and GDP). Germans love cash and gold, and don't trust online payments very much.

Just guessing here, but it wouldn't surprise me if Germany is the place which has the least amount of Bitcoin usage out of all the major economies of the world (with China of course being the most Bitcoin frenzy bubblelicious)

Re:

[Sejus]

WW2?

Re:

[pezezin]

The biggest war effort by far was done by the Soviet Union, but 70 years of Hollywood have done a nice job promoting the USA as the saviors.