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Comment by kalleth | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Contactless went down completely

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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