Randomly, until a minute or so ago, the caption on the photo of the Visa card read “Visa says it is to carry out a review of Wikileaks”. The mind boggled.
Would it be just bad reporting and the real issue would be an acquirer bank being down (thus affecting all cards and making it look like the card networks are down)? I find it hard to believe both would go down at the same time…
While is some shops MasterCard is working but Visa is not, in others no cards are working.
I assume this is where some shops use an acquirer independent from the Visa scheme but others use an acquirer utilising the Visa network, no other logical explanation.
Paymentsense, which provides merchant services to more than 60,000 independent businesses across the UK and Ireland, tweeted: “Visa has advised us that they are having issues with its authorisation service since 14:36pm which may cause intermittent authorisation call failures & time outs.”
What are those exactly? Isn’t it a direct connection between an ATM/terminal and the acquirer’s backend (using whatever protocol they want), where it’s finally sorted based on which network it should end up in, before being fanned out to Amex/Mastercard/Visa/etc? I fail to see where Visa would come into play besides the last step.
Oh wow, buying legacy rust and slapping their own brand on it. What a disaster.
I thought that as a business you had to provide value - what value is there if the customer can buy the same thing off Visa directly (probably for way cheaper)?
