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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....
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.
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.
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.
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).
In short, no it doesn't work anything like that.
Have a read of this, more specifically the sections titled "four party model" and "What happens when you buy something".
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