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Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

theguardian.com

31–40 of 190 posts

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When 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?

I'm British, and we have both Visa Debit and Visa Credit in the UK. I haven't yet looked into whether it's Visa Debit or Visa Credit or both which is experiencing issues.

Okay, so to clarify: are you're seeing 10% failure rates on Visa Debit+Credit, or 10% on everything (including Mastercard, Amex, etc)?

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#32

What's the betting someone pushed something to production on a Friday afternoon and has now gone to the pub?

At 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.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#33
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa don't issue or distribute credit cards, banks do. I have 3 Visa cards, only one is a credit card.

In the UK they do

No, they don't. VISA just owns the network that makes all these cards work in lots of places. Banks issue cards.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#34

This 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).

My 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 :(

Here in Sweden many former Visa outfits have gone to Mastercard, so now it's sort of hard to find a Visa CC here. I've gone out of my way to have one Visa and one MC though.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm British, and we have both Visa Debit and Visa Credit in the UK. I haven't yet looked into whether it's Visa Debit or Visa Credit or both which is experiencing issues.

Okay, so to clarify: are you're seeing 10% failure rates on Visa Debit+Credit, or 10% on everything (including Mastercard, Amex, etc)?

No failures on Mastercard or Amex.

Occasionally a spike up to 10% failure rate of all our card transactions (sorry, misunderstood your Q). ~80% of our transactions are VISA of some sort.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#36
post #32

What's the betting someone pushed something to production on a Friday afternoon and has now gone to the pub?

At 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.

Maybe someone forgot the golden rule: fire people on Monday mornings. Never on Fridays.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#37
post #32

What's the betting someone pushed something to production on a Friday afternoon and has now gone to the pub?

At 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.

There're plenty of other explanations. Not all failures are linked to deploys. The root cause could turn out to be a hardware failure somewhere. It could be a botched rollback of a change earlier in the week that had lesser consequences. It could be a change that was scheduled to take place on the 1st of the month, where the person who chose the live-date didn't think about the day of the week. Or it could be, as you describe it, someone without any sense.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#38
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa don't issue or distribute credit cards, banks do. I have 3 Visa cards, only one is a credit card.

In the UK they do

VISA 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.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#39
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm British, and we have both Visa Debit and Visa Credit in the UK. I haven't yet looked into whether it's Visa Debit or Visa Credit or both which is experiencing issues.

Okay, so to clarify: are you're seeing 10% failure rates on Visa Debit+Credit, or 10% on everything (including Mastercard, Amex, etc)?

Have just checked; we're seeing both Visa and Visa Debit having problems.

Re: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe

#40
post #15
post #5

It 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.

Do the bin's point to a specific bank group?

No
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