Wait til they all come in complaining the money has been taken from their accounts even though it was declined. People are going mad on twitter
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And only yesterday someone on here was saying
I rest my case.
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Oh I know I can’t wait. At the very least it’ll be interesting to see if it did from a technical standpoint 
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Makes you wonder where the redundancy is in Visa’s systems!
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I suspect the only redundancy was that given to the people that built the system years ago!
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Monzo did not really choose Mastercard, it’s just out of the two major card issuers Mastercard was more open to working with Monzo.
If out of two people only one shows willingness to work with you is it really a choice?
Oh I never got a notification. feels left out
I guess the rust finally let go. 
I’m surprised it took them that long to get it back working though. I can understand hardware failure but surely they have another spare machine onto which they can redeploy the software in a matter of minutes?
Oddly, I very rarely use Curve, but I wanted to get some cash yesterday (before the Visa outage), so I used my Curve card to get cashback with some shopping on my Visa credit card.
It worked s treat and saved a trip to the ATM, as well as saving Monzo some pennies.
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Suspect it wasn’t a machine as such… even years ago banks used to keep live parallel networks for just such an emergency… unless the people that told me that were lying (they had no reason to) failure of a single piece of hardware couldn’t bring down the network.
To me it sounds like a router nobody realized was a single point of failure until it was too late. Even 24/7 callout is going to take a couple of hours to get a new one in there.
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It was a ‘broken switch’…
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It also took them nearly an hour to hold an crisis meeting to discuss what to do, and didn’t inform the public/press for even longer…
Frankly a piss poor response if you ask me - British daily economic flow requires the payment systems to be readily avaliable at all times, and when card acceptance is effetively a duopoly - we need these guys to be doing a better job at it.
Nearly 12 hours downtime is not acceptable for a 5x 9’s service.
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One switch is pivotal to the entire thing? Bloody hell…
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Switch failure is the hardest thing to diagnose… they tend to just start randomly corrupting stuff rather than failing completely, so the source of the problem can be quite elusive.
That said they should have stuff like that on expensive maintenance contracts that should replace it relatively quick… certainly quicker than 12 hours.
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One thing I’ve never understood about this is that if Visa was down and the cards couldn’t connect to get authorisation why weren’t they just processed offline?
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Depends on many things - the merchant could not want to take on extra risk and disables offline processing at the terminal level.
Also if the card networks are down it could be that they are damaged in a way that they give a valid decline response to terminals, so as far as they are concerned the transaction went through fine and there’s no reason to attempt an offline transaction.
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It seems that regulators have found the solution to bank and card outages! Make sure it doesn’t last longer than 2 days 
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Errr well
- That’s too long anyway
- How the hell would the FCA enforce that downtime is less than 2 days? If it’s down it is down until it is fixed - a document written by a quango that says it should be down for less than two days won’t help.
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It’ll be counterproductive because what bean counters will do upon hearing that will read ‘We’re OK with a 2 day outage’ and reduce the network resilience to save money.
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