Visa’s data center operations team was still investigating together with the company that made the switch. It was a “very rare partial failure,” the letter said but didn’t name the component or the manufacturer of the switch.īecause the failure was partial, the system continued trying to synchronize with the secondary data center, creating a backlog of messages there, and hampering the secondary site’s ability to process transactions.Īs of the date on the letter, the exact cause of the component failure had not been identified. When a component within a core switch in one of the data centers failed, the nature of the failure prevented the backup switch from activating. The backup switch is designed to take over if the primary one fails, and the switch failover scheme is also implicated in the incident. Two core switches (primary and backup) direct transactions for processing in each of the facilities. This synchronization system was involved in the outage. They’re kept in sync by constantly communicating system status.
#Credit card processing outage full#
That means one is a mirror image of the other, and if one of them fails, the other is designed to handle the full transaction load on its own automatically.
Visa has two data centers in the UK in an “active-active” configuration. Here’s what happened, according to Hogg: Failure to Switch The company offers some third-party companies that provide services around electronic payments to merchants a way to send transactions from other networks through its systems, but “fewer than 1,000 transactions on this gateway service were impacted,” the company said. Outside the peak periods, the failure rate was about 7 percent. About half of the remaining 9 percent went through on second attempt.ĭuring the two periods of “peak disruption,” a 10-minute period followed by a 50-minute period in the afternoon, 35 percent of transactions failed to process on average. According to Hogg’s letter, most of the transactions attempted over the course of the incident (91 percent) went through normally, the rest (5.2 million swipes) failing. There was never a full system outage, Visa claims. She also provided some technical details about the cause of the incident, attributing it to a failure of a hardware switch component in one of the company’s data centers. In a response addressed to Nicky Morgan, member of the Parliament who chairs the House of Commons’ Treasury Committee, Visa’s European CEO Charlotte Hogg said the company held itself accountable for the incident and would compensate cardholders. The incident, caused by a network-switch failure, resulted in millions of credit-card transactions failing to go through, prompting UK regulators to send a letter to the company a few days later requesting a detailed explanation of what happened and what the company’s plans were in terms of compensating those affected and preventing a similar incident from happening in the future. Related: Visa Plans Its First Non-US Data Centers - In London and Singapore acquired London-based Visa Europe in 2016.
Visa Europe, the European unit of the global payment processing giant, saw its data center infrastructure fail in an incident that took the company’s operations team about 10 hours to resolve. On the afternoon of June 1, a Friday, many people across the UK couldn’t use their Visa credit cards in shops, pubs, restaurants, and wherever else electronic payments are accepted.
0 kommentar(er)
