I was just told in the supermarket card payments are down in -all- supermarkets in my neighborhood. The internet doesn't seem to know much about it yet.
Search for 'credit card down' and you'll see very widespread reports of machines being down at Lowes, Shoprite, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Circle K, Home Depot, Whole Foods are just a few of the brands I've seen multiple twitter users mention, and the places being mentioned are across the country.
The Toast system is down, too.
Lots of people tweeting at company brands complaining that they can't accept cards. Lots of exasperated retail workers, too.
Ha! Great to know there is a word for this phenomenon.
I encountered this first hand on the Wikipedia page “Substances Poisonous to Dogs” [1] subsection about Onions & Garlic. The only citation eventually self-references the same Wikipedia page from whence you started.
I was already skeptical that the single most common vegetable and ingredient in human food was somehow poisonous to dogs, but now convinced it’s entirely made-up.
Well I've actually paid for street food using lightning, and also use it regularly it to send money to my family using Strike. It's instant and practically free.
So FedNow instant payments? If one has to choose between central finance with regulations, protections, and recourse and cryptofolks running DeFI with zero recourse, which is a financial participant more likely to choose?
Sure, crypto might be useful in a few backwater or failing nation states. In all other situations, it’s a dumpster fire being put forth as a solution when there are other superior options.
China, the US, or Europe could even offer digital wallets to individuals in those countries if they could get KYC worked out. Venezuelans use USD via Zelle for example, not crypto.
Where did you get this number? Transactions for as low as 1 satoshi per vbyte have been included for a while, with the average around 10 sats/vbyte. That’s like 3 cents for one transaction.
I’m not sure what you would need to dispute. Bitcoin, when used properly can’t be “stolen”. Compare that with Visa where every single merchant you come into contact with can steal your card, and charge arbitrary amounts to it by design. As someone who has had to go through a few disputes in recent history, depending on the bank, they treat you like a criminal and need to go though an elaborate process to dispute. And if the merchant doesn’t agree you are SOL. Never lost a penny in Bitcoin where I’ve had thousands stolen from me via traditional credit cards.
Bitcoin transactions can be written to support escrow use cases.
*Edit: Transactions can be sent to a script which requires multiple keys to forward the funds from that script address to a wallet address. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multi-signature
This is the primary mechanism for escrow services to function. If the need for a CC-like refund feature is important to the user, one could potentially use a service over Bitcoin which is party to a 2-of-3 multisig transaction. The payment may be settled immediately by the buyer and seller. Or either party may dispute with the service provider to settle according to some agreement.
To perform escrow with that technology a trusted third party is required, at which point, you are resolving disputes exactly the same way it works with credit cards: you are convincing some organization that the transaction wasn’t satisfied.
Isn’t that due to regulation? Surely we can also apply some rules to payment processors that use a decentralized network under the hood and get the best of all worlds?
Visa’s operating margins are insane. I think we can do better than a global oligopoly skimming %ages of every transaction.
yes but that regulation is based on the root of trust of strong KYC and AML. bitcoin just uses a private key that anyone can generate and use. again by design
I'm pretty sure running the Visa network is a lot more energy efficient today. And you cannot discount the fact that miners will also skim percentages of every transaction.
Visa has a huge footprint and those plastic cards are not organic. The toxic material for printing plus the buildings and employees who drive in to work each day to keep the system going or the millions of miles Visa sales, repair, security, etc drive each year need to be counted.
Miners are cheap.. Visa execs flying in private planes are worse for the environment.
If I pay for something, and the merchant doesn't deliver - I have a legal right to a refund which the credit card provider will give me. This is standard in the UK.
If I'm daft enough to pay for something with Bitcoin - well, transactions are irreversible by design. So in the case of non-delivery, or a broken / misdecsribed product, there's no mechanism to force a refund.
If your credit card provider treats you like a criminal - use the free market and choose another one. Or complain to the regulator.
If your cryptocurrency provider is a bit rubbish… well, you're stuck with a single unregulated blockchain.
You have no right. Visa decides who wins the dispute. That may be the standard but get someone having a bad day and you might get the non-standard treatment.
Bitcoin can absolutely be stolen, and there is zero remediation process for when it happens.
Eg:
1. You buy something on the internet. The merchant never ships it.
2. Your system is infected with malware and your key is stolen.
Both of these scenarios are trivial to remediate on a major credit card network in a country with reasonable banking regulations, and impossible to remediate on the bitcoin network.
Isn't that how cash works where you would need to sue the store.. You wouldn't be able to reverse a bank card purchase without a court order either.
If your computer is infected with malware and your bank allows someone to transfer the money in your account out there are some delay safeguards but you still could lose it.
If you use an exchange they have some safeguards in place.
If your holding the wallet you are the safe guard.
If you perform a transaction using your own wallet, for which you control the private key, that transaction is now public knowledge on the blockchain.
If instead you perform the transaction using a cryptocurrency exchange it won't be public. However, you can't perform transactions if that exchange is down, making the argument that "bitcoin fixes this" a moot point.
Bitcoins entire premise is around the movement of unspents. If you always use the same wallet for every transaction it is pretty easy to track who sent the money. If you instead are always sending your money to a newly derived wallet from your HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) root it does make it much more difficult to track what money was money being spent on something and what money is part of a persons total value
You still can dispute a charge with a store but like cash it would be up to you to sue to get your money back.
Is it better to have some unknown entity at VISA making these decisions based some internal rules and how they feel today?
Visa can be charged by hand no internet but no merchant will because VISA has a rule saying any fraud with a card without a pin the store pays for which is why VISA is down today.
> Is it better to have some unknown entity at VISA making these decisions based some internal rules and how they feel today?
As opposed to rushing my lawyer in his tuxedo to settle a $8 double payment on the whopper I just bought at local Burger King?
You underestimate the convenience payment processors afford you in everyday life. Approximately 5-8% of my credit has some issue (wrong amounts, double pay, late charges on split payment, chargebacks etc). I don't suppose the percentage will be significantly lesser for any average bloke who makes all transactions on card.
Funny we were just at the supermarket and this was going on. I used my Amex and it went through fine. Lines everywhere, people rushing to the single ATM in the area. What's in your wallet? ;-)
No, I’ve used my Visa cards multiple times today. Within the last few hours. Statements like that aren’t uncommon, when a store’s system goes down.
I have no idea why they feel the need to exaggerate, or maybe they are just passing on here-say they got from their manger, without applying critical thinking. Maybe these things spread like the classic ‘telephone’ game.
This actually happened to my friend at a festival a few weeks ago. He was told a similar statement, that the ’WHOLE’ Mastercard network was down across the country. Meanwhile it wasn’t, it was just their particular system.
Really though, how would some random clerk know that information, in the middle of a shift. All they know is theirs is down.
In this case, based on other commenters, there does seem to be something of a real outage (obviously not for the whole US though). However, as someone who has worked this style of job, I can describe why these fake outages happen:
While 95% of people are understanding about this, some small portion of customers are unable to separate the store they're shopping at from the minimum wage employee they're talking to. If you say "our system is down" they'll berate you for this mistake and act like it's your fault despite that fact that you're a cashier that makes $10/hour and has no control at all over CC payments other than pressing a button on the register.
It's not worth dealing with this so you lie about it being somebody else's fault: your internet is down or it's the card processor's fault.
Yeah that’s great point. That’s probably a very likely reason. It’s a good way to preempt any customers possibly getting angry at the employees or the business. Defer the blame to a tier above your control. I wonder if there is a term for that? I could see the same phenomenon happening other scenarios.
It’s called an agent of limited authority. The cashier as an agent of the principal-merchant has limited authority to process transactions at the point of service, nothing more. When problems arise beyond that authority, they defer blame to the “tier above.” It’s a useful negotiating tactic.
> Why does this get to the front-page of HN is the real question..
Fintech is a major part of tech, the question is why wouldn't it be? The VISA network relies on many intermediaries and it's bound to be affiliated with some clearing house that may have been undergoing maintenance on it's servers and sine thus is HN someone may be working on said maintenance.
For what it's worth, I just used VISA to pay from my dinner in EU, and it went through no problem.
I’m not in Poland, but I would love to know if all payment processing was down in Poland because it would mean today I wouldn’t get paid by any of my Polish subscribers, and depending on the problem my payment intermediary might incorrectly mark the payments as failed and cancel the subscriptions.
Many people don’t understand how card networks work. Generally there are many parties involved in a payment. There is an issuer (usually a bank), acquirer bank, the visa network itself, the payment processor company, etc.
If peering between any of these entities is interrupted, there are sometimes “stand in authorization” that allows the card to continue to work, or people may assume the visa network itself is at fault even if it is not the issue per se.
It’s possible (even likely) that a retailers payment processor is having issues in certain scenarios and the retailer just issues a blanket statement “visa is down” which is actually a misnomer.
They are called "middlemen", having been one several times, and in the last few years as "fintech" has exploded the industry has become overrun with more and more of such companies that add little value outside of raking in high fees for the owners.
Yes, there is even a movie about it. imdb dot com/title/tt1251757/
Looks like Paymentech's (Chase) payment processing may be down.
PARTIAL OUTAGE
OCCURRED DATE : 2022-05-21 10:35:00 PST
We are aware of an issue that is currently affecting transaction processing intermittently on the Paymentech processor. We are working to identify the issue as quickly as possible and have received confirmation from Paymentech that they are experiencing issues and are actively investigating, however they are unable to provide an ETA on resolution at this time.
We will continue to monitor this issue and work with Paymentech until we have a confirmed resolution in place.
Aaaand it's gone. There isn't a single mention of it in the press, either. Huge portion of the US couldn't do credit card transactions for a few hours and...nothing.
About 4 hours ago today, I was trying to pay for food with my Chase card. It wasn't working even though I input the card information correctly. I strongly suspect it was related to this outage.
For some reason, I was able to bypass the Chase issue by using Apple Pay (in app).
Went to a Cali burger today and their whole system was down, from the ordering kiosks to the automated fry cooking machines. But they had a swipe set up for credit cards that seemed to work ok (no ApplePay or chip/NFC).
In the US, there's been a lot of supermarket consolidation over the years. For example, T̶o̶m̶ ̶T̶h̶u̶m̶b̶,̶ ̶A̶l̶b̶e̶r̶t̶s̶o̶n̶'̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶K̶r̶o̶g̶e̶r̶'̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶n̶y̶. My guess is this is a situation like that. The stores near you all picked the same company/tech to do credit card payments. Maybe because they are all owned by the same company.
Ah, yeah, I apparently missed with Kroger there. Market Street, Randall's, Von's, United, Safeway, Tom Thumb, and Albertson's are apparently the same company.
Happened to be at starbucks earlier in wa state and they said they’re not able to process credit card transactions at any locations. Not sure about visa specifically
We were not informed of any outages that required tech org employees to come online. (Perhaps another region handled it, but usually it is communicated company wide)
I suspect that a dependency client (Acquirer, Issuer Processor) had issues which caused the network to be down.
We were not informed of any outages that required tech org employees to come online. (Perhaps another region handled it, but usually it is communicated company wide)
I suspect that a dependency client (Acquirer, Issuer Processor) had issues which caused the network to be down.
99 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/search?q=visa+down&f=live
and
https://downdetector.com/status/visa/
The Toast system is down, too.
Lots of people tweeting at company brands complaining that they can't accept cards. Lots of exasperated retail workers, too.
I encountered this first hand on the Wikipedia page “Substances Poisonous to Dogs” [1] subsection about Onions & Garlic. The only citation eventually self-references the same Wikipedia page from whence you started.
I was already skeptical that the single most common vegetable and ingredient in human food was somehow poisonous to dogs, but now convinced it’s entirely made-up.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substances_poisonous_to_dogs
Hrm, probably should not say that out loud.
The volume now is (in relative terms) slightly above zero, which it cannot handle.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
China, the US, or Europe could even offer digital wallets to individuals in those countries if they could get KYC worked out. Venezuelans use USD via Zelle for example, not crypto.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/06/16/venezuela-is-a-t...
reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
Bit a of an apple to oranges comparison anyways but that's the biggest difference.
Where did you get this number? Transactions for as low as 1 satoshi per vbyte have been included for a while, with the average around 10 sats/vbyte. That’s like 3 cents for one transaction.
But you can buy servers at vultr.com or domains at porkbun.com (that's what I use bitcoin for) :)
They tried, but it's been deemed not legal for them to do that in most states.
What now? With credit cards, you can dispute the charge and get your money back. With bitcoin, it's gone forever.
*Edit: Transactions can be sent to a script which requires multiple keys to forward the funds from that script address to a wallet address. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multi-signature
This is the primary mechanism for escrow services to function. If the need for a CC-like refund feature is important to the user, one could potentially use a service over Bitcoin which is party to a 2-of-3 multisig transaction. The payment may be settled immediately by the buyer and seller. Or either party may dispute with the service provider to settle according to some agreement.
The settlement layer is rarely the most interesting part of a retail payment system.
Visa’s operating margins are insane. I think we can do better than a global oligopoly skimming %ages of every transaction.
Miners are cheap.. Visa execs flying in private planes are worse for the environment.
If I'm daft enough to pay for something with Bitcoin - well, transactions are irreversible by design. So in the case of non-delivery, or a broken / misdecsribed product, there's no mechanism to force a refund.
If your credit card provider treats you like a criminal - use the free market and choose another one. Or complain to the regulator.
If your cryptocurrency provider is a bit rubbish… well, you're stuck with a single unregulated blockchain.
I know which model I prefer!
Nor my experience.
Eg:
1. You buy something on the internet. The merchant never ships it.
2. Your system is infected with malware and your key is stolen.
Both of these scenarios are trivial to remediate on a major credit card network in a country with reasonable banking regulations, and impossible to remediate on the bitcoin network.
If your computer is infected with malware and your bank allows someone to transfer the money in your account out there are some delay safeguards but you still could lose it.
If you use an exchange they have some safeguards in place.
If your holding the wallet you are the safe guard.
Visa is charge upto 30% a year on balances now.
If instead you perform the transaction using a cryptocurrency exchange it won't be public. However, you can't perform transactions if that exchange is down, making the argument that "bitcoin fixes this" a moot point.
Is it better to have some unknown entity at VISA making these decisions based some internal rules and how they feel today?
Visa can be charged by hand no internet but no merchant will because VISA has a rule saying any fraud with a card without a pin the store pays for which is why VISA is down today.
Businesses would rather use cryto.
As opposed to rushing my lawyer in his tuxedo to settle a $8 double payment on the whopper I just bought at local Burger King?
You underestimate the convenience payment processors afford you in everyday life. Approximately 5-8% of my credit has some issue (wrong amounts, double pay, late charges on split payment, chargebacks etc). I don't suppose the percentage will be significantly lesser for any average bloke who makes all transactions on card.
I have no idea why they feel the need to exaggerate, or maybe they are just passing on here-say they got from their manger, without applying critical thinking. Maybe these things spread like the classic ‘telephone’ game.
This actually happened to my friend at a festival a few weeks ago. He was told a similar statement, that the ’WHOLE’ Mastercard network was down across the country. Meanwhile it wasn’t, it was just their particular system.
Really though, how would some random clerk know that information, in the middle of a shift. All they know is theirs is down.
While 95% of people are understanding about this, some small portion of customers are unable to separate the store they're shopping at from the minimum wage employee they're talking to. If you say "our system is down" they'll berate you for this mistake and act like it's your fault despite that fact that you're a cashier that makes $10/hour and has no control at all over CC payments other than pressing a button on the register.
It's not worth dealing with this so you lie about it being somebody else's fault: your internet is down or it's the card processor's fault.
Fintech is a major part of tech, the question is why wouldn't it be? The VISA network relies on many intermediaries and it's bound to be affiliated with some clearing house that may have been undergoing maintenance on it's servers and sine thus is HN someone may be working on said maintenance.
For what it's worth, I just used VISA to pay from my dinner in EU, and it went through no problem.
If peering between any of these entities is interrupted, there are sometimes “stand in authorization” that allows the card to continue to work, or people may assume the visa network itself is at fault even if it is not the issue per se.
It’s possible (even likely) that a retailers payment processor is having issues in certain scenarios and the retailer just issues a blanket statement “visa is down” which is actually a misnomer.
Yes, there is even a movie about it. imdb dot com/title/tt1251757/
PARTIAL OUTAGE OCCURRED DATE : 2022-05-21 10:35:00 PST We are aware of an issue that is currently affecting transaction processing intermittently on the Paymentech processor. We are working to identify the issue as quickly as possible and have received confirmation from Paymentech that they are experiencing issues and are actively investigating, however they are unable to provide an ETA on resolution at this time.
We will continue to monitor this issue and work with Paymentech until we have a confirmed resolution in place.
Should you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact support at: https://support.authorize.net/
https://status.authorize.net/#/dashboard
The best PR money can buy...
For some reason, I was able to bypass the Chase issue by using Apple Pay (in app).
This is not true.
See: https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/home/default.aspx
There are many third party vendors that depend on this business to provide entry points for merchants to the VISA network.
We were not informed of any outages that required tech org employees to come online. (Perhaps another region handled it, but usually it is communicated company wide)
I suspect that a dependency client (Acquirer, Issuer Processor) had issues which caused the network to be down.
We were not informed of any outages that required tech org employees to come online. (Perhaps another region handled it, but usually it is communicated company wide)
I suspect that a dependency client (Acquirer, Issuer Processor) had issues which caused the network to be down.