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

theguardian.com

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

#62

Post by ben509 »

kalleth wrote: 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.

I think you and the media are both wrong. You're wrong because the distribution of outage is rarely uniform. If 9 of 10 attempts worked, customers would try their cards again and there'd be no story.

What we see here is that some customers are seeing a total outage, while others are entirely unaffected. And the press is more wrong, because by ignoring the 90% who are unaffected, they exaggerate the problem by an order of magnitude.

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

#63

Post by wil421 »

Glad 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.

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

#64

Post by kalleth »

ben509 wrote: post #62
kalleth wrote: 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.

I think you and the media are both wrong. You're wrong because the distribution of outage is rarely uniform. If 9 of 10 attempts worked, customers would try their cards again and there'd be no story. What we see here is that some customers are seeing a total outage, while others are entirely unaffected. And the press is more wrong, because by ignoring the 90% who are unaffected, they exaggerate the problem by an orde…

Interesting. Yes, this is certainly a possibility (and far worse for people who are impacted).

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

#65

Post by falcon620 »

kalleth wrote: post #35
falcon620 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it's actually quite hard to use your data as a proxy of understanding how badly Visa Europe credit cards are doing.

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

#66

Post by johnflan »

martinald wrote: post #6
the_duke wrote: post #3

Luckily, 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...

Not in the UK, it's all mastercard/visa now.

Visa Debit in Ireland too, now.

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

#67

Post by falcon620 »

dageshi wrote: post #52
falcon620 wrote: post #13

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).

Yes and add to that some emergency cash. 500 USD in $100 bills is easy to carry along with your passport.

Sure. (I've been carrying around 20 * 20 Euro bills. Larger denominations seem to be scary to people who aren't used to them.)

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

#69

Post by sakisv »

mdekkers wrote: post #56
DangerousPie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 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.

every 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.

I 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.
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