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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

#131

Post by subcosmos »

kalleth wrote: post #64
ben509 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

maybe someone on the fraud detection end pushed a model with too high of a sensitivity

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

#132

Post by Woofles »

jayd16 wrote: post #85
davnicwil wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, it seems great. But who is paying for that fraud protection? Who is paying for that customer service team? Who is paying for the fact you get paid to use it? In the end.. It's you, through slightly higher prices on everything you buy every day because retailers have to price in the cost of credit card fees that pay for all that.

Most of the time there's no explicit CC charge so you'd still be paying for it whether you paid cash or not.

In fact I'm pretty sure Visa and Mastercard forbid charging a different price if customers pay in cash.

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

#133

Post by s73v3r_ »

mkirklions wrote: post #101
crazygringo wrote: post #88

Curious, do credit card companies provide SLA's? If you lose x% of sales on a day due to customers not having alternative forms of payment... is there anything a merchant can do to recoup their losses?

Merchants learn their lesson and look to alternative forms of payments... Like... BITCO apple pay/android pay

If the Visa network is down, those options wouldn't work either, would they?

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

#134

Post by subcosmos »

subcosmos wrote: post #130
gargravarr wrote: post #24

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

Someone can't push the fix right now because they are stuck in vim trying to save the git commit message

AAAND they are ambien-committing ....

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

#135

Post by hacker_9 »

Yeah I just tried to pay with contactless at the Tesco self checkout, it failed and the security guard told me to enter my PIN instead. That worked, though I just checked my balance and see I've been charged twice for my shopping. Fuming.

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

#136

Post by codeismylife »

davnicwil wrote: post #82
anoncoward111 wrote: post #71

Ironically my credit card info literally got stolen at a restaurant last night and most of the purchases they tried to make were declined hahahahah Honestly, I really enjoy using my credit card. I can buy anything, anytime, online, the customer service department always resolves fraud quickly, and they even pay me to use the damn thing

I know, it seems great. But who is paying for that fraud protection? Who is paying for that customer service team? Who is paying for the fact you get paid to use it? In the end.. It's you, through slightly higher prices on everything you buy every day because retailers have to price in the cost of credit card fees that pay for all that.

> retailers have to price in the cost of credit card fees

Do retailers actually do this? I briefly worked in retail a while back and the payment processing fees(online and offline) were all considered to be part of the cost of doing business and essentially taken up by the merchant.

Today I provide ecommerce solutions and all my merchants haven't priced in the cost of payment processing either. They aren't necessarily happy about it but they consider it to be part of the cost of engaging in commerce in the modern world otherwise they'll be annihilated by their competitors if they don't provide easy ways to accept payments from their patrons.

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

#137

Post by makomk »

falcon620 wrote: post #125
makomk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all Mastercard/Visa now in the UK, for both debit and credit cards - and I think Visa is probably the more common of the two these days. Debit cards are pretty much always Visa here and have been for about a decade now.

Yeah, that's not helpful, I'm afraid. Also demonstrably incorrect. Amex is still operating in the UK, for example.

There is precisely one issuer of non-Mastercard/Visa credit cards in the UK - Amex - and they're not accepted nearly as widely. There are exactly five banks which issue Mastercard debit cards rather than Visa - Virgin Money, Citibank, Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank, and Metro Bank - and none of them are particularly major players. (I think it was down to three or less at one point; Virgin and Citibank only switched in 2015.) Santander and TSB have apparently announced they're planning to switch to Mastercard debit in the future but currently their customers have Visa debit cards too. Maestro is dead as a dodo here, and the old UK-specific Switch debit card system no longer exists.

So in actual fact, people in the UK who're reliant on their debit cards are more likely to be affected by this than people with credit cards too, even if the cards are from the same bank - banks that issue Mastercard credit cards generally use Visa for debit cards.

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

#138

Post by hamstercat »

hacker_9 wrote: post #135

Yeah I just tried to pay with contactless at the Tesco self checkout, it failed and the security guard told me to enter my PIN instead. That worked, though I just checked my balance and see I've been charged twice for my shopping. Fuming.

Just call your credit card issuer, they will remove one of the two. They may not be perfect, but they have good customer service.

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

#139

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #121
davnicwil wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, it seems great. But who is paying for that fraud protection? Who is paying for that customer service team? Who is paying for the fact you get paid to use it? In the end.. It's you, through slightly higher prices on everything you buy every day because retailers have to price in the cost of credit card fees that pay for all that.

In the end it's the (usually) poor people who bought more than they could afford (either because they needed food or because they couldn't control their impulse buys) and are stuck paying interest on things they bought years ago

Credit card interest payments go to the bank. Visa/MasterCard don’t get any of that.
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