[kalleth]

It isn't down.

I work for a large e-commerce company and we're seeing ~10% decline rates, at most, on VISA cards only, and that's intermittent. Overall average decline rate is more like 1-3% when you factor in the intermittentness of it.

Still not great, but not PAYMENT CHAOS and not a CRASH OF THE VISA NETWORK.

[ben509]

I think you and the media are both wrong. You're wrong because the distribution of outage is rarely uniform. If 9 of 10 attempts worked, customers would try their cards again and there'd be no story.

What we see here is that some customers are seeing a total outage, while others are entirely unaffected. And the press is more wrong, because by ignoring the 90% who are unaffected, they exaggerate the problem by an order of magnitude.

[kalleth]

Interesting. Yes, this is certainly a possibility (and far worse for people who are impacted).

[subcosmos]

maybe someone on the fraud detection end pushed a model with too high of a sensitivity

[gargravarr]

You forget, everything is chaos in the media. Trains, travel, finance, whatever you like. Chaos sells :)

[frockington]

don't forget tweets, the most dangerous enemy mankind has faced

[gargravarr]

Nah, tweets are just the Two Minutes' Hate - intense rage, pure undistilled fury... then quiet until the next one.

[Artemis2]

Same here — I work for an online payments company. We’ve been seeing a dip of 2–7 points for the past few hours across our network.

[sitepodmatt]

I hope it's not the real poor one where status page updates takes an hour plus. .begins with S

[dang]

Ok, we'll ramp 'payment chaos' down to 'increased decline rates'.

[dreamfactored]

Contactless went down completely

[kalleth]

To be fair I can't comment on POS/in-person transaction rates. All I have visibility into is online purchases with VISA cards on our site.

[mey]

Do the bin's point to a specific bank group?

[kalleth]

No

[falcon620]

When you say you're seeing 10% decline rates, is that out of your total transactional volume (which I suspect is the case), or just out of the subset of your customer who actually have bona fide Visa credit cards?

[kalleth]

I'm British, and we have both Visa Debit and Visa Credit in the UK. I haven't yet looked into whether it's Visa Debit or Visa Credit or both which is experiencing issues.

[falcon620]

Okay, so to clarify: are you're seeing 10% failure rates on Visa Debit+Credit, or 10% on everything (including Mastercard, Amex, etc)?

[kalleth]

No failures on Mastercard or Amex.

Occasionally a spike up to 10% failure rate of all our card transactions (sorry, misunderstood your Q). ~80% of our transactions are VISA of some sort.

[falcon620]

So it's actually quite hard to use your data as a proxy of understanding how badly Visa Europe credit cards are doing.

[kalleth]

Have just checked; we're seeing both Visa and Visa Debit having problems.