[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