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Visa Card Payment Systems Go Down Across Europe (bleepingcomputer.com)
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.
Perhaps their server crashed mining bitcoins....
The more e-pay systems fail, the longer the goal of a cashless society is pushed back.
And they want us to all go cashless with companies like Visa handling the transactions?
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.
>> 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.
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)
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.
Go cashless now! Yeah!
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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.
VISA probably forgot to respond to an GDPR e-mail and got cut off.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
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 if you want, a separate credit card. That credit card is not directly linked to your bank account either, it is a separate charge account which you pay once a month, kind of like with American Express.
Here in the U.S., my Bank of America card has the Visa logo, and is directly linked to my bank account. It can be run debit and credit. My Amex is not, I pay that bill separately. In Europe, my ABN AMRO card is debit only.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
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.
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.
Because Germany is the whole world?
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 technologies" but doesn't say what those technologies are).
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?
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 on top of it and you don't have the cash to cover them, and you get hit with more fees, that you have to fight to have retracted.
No sir....not for me.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
WW2?
And debit cards are purple. Who do you think runs the biggest debit card network?
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.