About that Visa payment network outage

Anonymous · ‎01-06-2018

For anyone keeping an eye on this after having trouble using their credit or debit card earlier here's the official twitter feed for you to keep an eye on https://twitter.com/VisaNewsEurope

MI5 · ‎01-06-2018

Heard this on the news earlier so bad news for many thousands of people hoping to go out tonight 😞

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Cleoriff · ‎01-06-2018

They had notices in the big supermarkets stating cash only. A bit grim..:smileysad:

Veritas Numquam Perit

pgn · ‎01-06-2018

Looks like it's fixed now...

Links to O2 Social Media Team here

Bambino · ‎01-06-2018

Stuff happens. Could happen to any company. No way to anticipate a hardware failure. Obviously must have affected many people, but it looks as if the outage didn't last too long. Just glad to hear it wasn't caused by anything malicious.

I DO NOT WORK FOR O2

sheepdog · ‎01-06-2018

I find it hard to believe that a multi-national company that relys heavly on IT infrastructure has a "hardware failure". It must have been a cascading failure on several servers to be that severe. Or their loadbalancing/failover was actually faulty and couldn't be brought back up quick enough. Read: their spare rack of standby servers didn't have the part that went bang.

Just reminded myself of a long forgotten dot com era term: high availbility 99.9999% uptime! Anyway, read for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability to why it fell out of use.

Either way, there's far too many of these incidents happening and these companies need to be bought to account to how resilient is their service especially as Visa are actively trying to move everything to card payments. Search for "visa wants to eliminate cash".

Anonymous · ‎02-06-2018

Well to be fair banks in general want to eliminate cash, or at least handle and carry it as little as possible. That's why you get so few bank raids these days. They carry very little cash, other than in the extremely safe cash machines, which the bank branch employees won't touch, or fill.

A large supermarket will handle and process a lot more cash than a bank branch, and do so using cash management and cash transport companies, not banks. If you want to withdraw a large amount of cash from your account in a bank branch you've got to give them two or three days notice!. Hiring a car, getting a hotel room, or taking out a mobile contract using cash is close to impossible, and the increase in 'no cash' businesses is on the rise.