Mastercard goes TITSUP in US, UK: There are some things money can't buy – like uptime Register readers, and quite a few other people, have been left with dead credit cards after Mastercard's payment system took a dive on Thursday. "Mastercard went down this evening," one Reg reader, based in Britain, told us privately. "Couldn’t pay for petrol. It’s a disgrace you can’t trust cards to pay when you need them to …
I work in retail and at the store I was at last night somebody asked me if there was an issue with our card payments system. I said "don't thknk so" because I'd just watched a relatively high value Visa transaction go through without a hitch. That was with the card present in the showroom and proved my cabling work hadn't killed the PDQ machine connectivity. However it wasn't working for the staff member trying to take a customer payment over the phone. I'll check today whether that was a MasterCard or not. Customer was unfazed and said they'd pay by bank transfer after their card was declined.
I already have a stockpile of cans of tuna (and other stuff), but cash probably won't help unless its in the form of about 0/25Kg of small change in a sock. In which case it could be used as a weapon.
BTW, some of my cans of tuna have been in the cupboard for a while. If it has a BBE date of May 2017, at what point does it become unsafe to eat?
"BTW, some of my cans of tuna have been in the cupboard for a while. If it has a BBE date of May 2017, at what point does it become unsafe to eat?"
Most canned items are good for much longer than the BBE date. If the can isn't bulged out and when you open it, it isn't a bit whiff, chances are that it's fine. I don't have a link, but there are some good guidelines online about what foods are safest to use past date and what the real world figures are for stored tins of different foods. I'd expect that if the tuna was off, it would be pretty obvious.
And I'm not talking to the payment providers.
Seriously people, it's 2018 and you're not carrying more than one (type of) credit/debit card around with you? Stop shitposting on twitter, hoping to get quoted by BuzzFeed, and get your own house in order - for one, make sure that no one single company can screw you over just because their service takes a lie-down.
Remember, the only thing preventing $bad_situation from happening, nowadays, is someone else's code - so build your own escape plan!
I always carry £100 cash in a separate compartment for circumstances just like this. Don't want to fill up with fuel and find the card payment system is down; or get stuck at a checkout with a load of groceries etc. I've only had to raid the "backup" a few of times over the years, but it has been worth keeping for those unexpected "cash only" circumstances.
"I always carry £100 cash in a separate compartment for circumstances just like this."
I usually pay cash - but carry a credit card as a back up. One day I gave all my notes to a charity collection. In the Waitrose supermarket I then used the credit card - but the reader kept failing to recognise it. I enquired what the manual emergency process was. The answer was that there wasn't one.
Eventually it did read it - but a few days later I noticed that till was having the same problem with another customer. I went to the customer services desk and suggested they needed some maintenance. They told me they could only call in the engineer if it failed completely.
Not so long ago the emergency backup process was the old style carbon-paper slips and rollover machines. Recently visited a Shell/Waitrose newly revamped on opening day and system was TITSUP. Guess what, not only did they have none of these but staff looked at me like I was an alien when I mentioned them.
Analogue backup methods should be mandatory (especially as the FCA just told the banks their systems WOULD fail sometime and they ought to plan for it. No shit, Sherlock.)
"Seriously for many year in Italy (it the time of the Lira) sweets were given as small change"
That was due to lack of coins in circulation ... I remember holidays in Italy as a child when there were want amounted to 10p notes in circulation ... these had no legal standing but amounted to IOUs issued by shops which everyone started accepting as cash. (Interestingly I think a more "official" version of this sort of scheme is what the new Italian government seem to be thinking about as a way to escape from the Euro without having to actually leave it)
"Seriously for many year in Italy (it the time of the Lira) sweets were given as small change"
In the early 80s I lived near one of the main European trunk roads, and at petrol stations it was quite common to get small change in a mixture of other currencies.
Dutch and Belgian operated cross-Channel ferries would allow you to pay for stuff in multiple currencies, so I offloaded my accumulated mixture of small change on those.
The reason why they don't use paper slips any more is cause the baster CC companies started processing them as a credit card not present . If find a processor that does not charge them as credit card not present you get hit with higher fees. Then you have less protection from charge back. Oh wants it gets processed and the card gets decline you most likely will not get paid . So most places rather lose a customer/sale then risk getting burned like that .
When the CC company's systems are on the floor with legs pointing upward, the question of liability perhaps becomes a bit moot. The CC companies really ought to be able to say 'system's down, use the slips and we'll cover it' but of course, late-stage capitalism means 'sod the customers (retailers), sod the consumers, and who cares if our reputation gets a bit soiled and we lose a tad of revenue, we're not taking any responsibility for anything that we can shove on to anyone else'
Last encountered a carbon paper credit card machine 2 or 3 years ago .. had taken my son to a fencing torunament at Birmingham University and was buying some equipement for him from Leon Paul stand there ... they had (doubtless from past experience) brought the manual carbon paper machines as there was no chance of modern electroniic machines getting the required mobile signal needed to authorise payments from the middle of the lower floor of the large concrete wall/floored sports centre!
" a few days later I noticed that till was having the same problem with another customer. I went to the customer services desk and suggested they needed some maintenance. They told me they could only call in the engineer if it failed completely."
Very much "computer says no" mentality and I'd be asking to speak to the duty manager, then escalating up the food chain - or would have done except that the standard british customer service mentality is "fuck off"
Funnily enough, going on Twitter and naming names has an interesting way of getting things fixed, fast.
"I always carry £100 cash in a separate compartment for circumstances just like this."
I do the same thing, Especially for longer trips out of town. That way I know I have dosh for petrol (if I'm driving) and some money for meals.
A friend of mine had an embarrassing moment when his deadbeat wife got a credit card sent to her on his business credit account and went on a big shop. He happened to be entertaining clients when his card was declined as over limit. I can't remember exactly how he resolved that at the time (other than the divorce which wasn't his idea).
Digital currency and payment methods can go titsup at any moment for hours or permanently. Having cash on hand is an easy insurance policy. Get a safe and then stash some backup elsewhere in the house (make the safe not too hard to find. Bottom of the wardrobe or someplace like that). If anybody breaks in, they may just nick the safe thinking thinking they've got all of the best goodies.
Lastly, it's much easier to stay on budget if you do your daily transactions in cash. Decide what you can spend each day for misc. stuff and only put that much cash in you pocket. Also, get a separate bank account to receive pay deposits and for what you may use to pay bills online then leave the debit card for that account put away at home. Use a secondary account that you top of from time to time to have a debit card you can carry around. If you get jacked up and forced to get cash from an ATM, you won't be risking your main account. You also can't make an impulse buy for too much without having to make a bigger effort in accessing your funds. Cash doesn't take electricity or a network to work.
Stop blaming the customer for the failings of the systems/software. It's not down to users fix the issue, it's down to the providers/developers/management.
If you want customers (your paymasters) to continue using your solution (and paying your wage) then you fix the problems your solution creates.
I agree that it genuinely could be useful to have both a Visa card and a MasterCard (EuroCard got assimilated, unfortunately), but Visa cards are far more common!
I don’t understand why MasterCard spend a small fortune on (fairly amusing) tv adverts, when it’s not people who are their customers, it’s the banks! And most banks in the UK choose to issue Visa cards, so...
MC spend a lot on advertising because they have the marketshare and want to keep it. I almost never see anyone use a VISA card anymore, and more and more stores won't take AMEX because of the high merchant fees. But its good to carry cards of different types for just such an "emergency"
"I did, and then most of the providers dropped MasterCard and converted them into Visa cards"
Why on Earth has someone downvoted that? From my experience, what AC said there is true. I have quite a few cards - they were a mix of different banks and spread between Visa and Mastercard. Now only one is Mastercard. (For example, the one attached to my main personal bank account was originally a Mastercard and was replaced with a Visa when the bank switched.)
Considering the majority of Reg readers are supposedly from a technical/systems background, I’m surprised that downvotes outweigh the upvotes on this one...
We know that 100% uptime is BS, so if you can’t be ars*d to implement a simple fallback solution, stop whinging.
Similar to the OP, my primary bank issues Visa only cards. So, I also have a MasterCard from another provider as a fallback for *when* the Visa or my bank’s own systems fail. Costs me nothing (no annual fee), and is a simple solution to avoid the drama.
Avoid the drama, folks xx
"Is it not possible to plug in a spare when one fails to read cards?"
They have to call somebody in the IT department to come out and do that. Getting to the plug often means pulling out the POS terminal and that's a nasty job if it's been in place for a while.
It's easier at small shops where they don't build the POS terminals into a counter as completely. One would think that shops would have spares, but I know that most don't. They spend lots of resources to make sure they always have inventory that people are buying, but don't back up the ability to get paid. They do generally keep an eye on having enough coins and small notes to make change.
To plug a PDQ is easy, to configure it requires an IT guy and a lengthy process with the PDQ provider...
And then you may have to reconfigure the POS system in order to send the transactions to the PDQ (anyone unfortunate enough to have worked with Oracle Xstore ?)
And since the shop will be charged for each configured PDQ, you can't expect it will have any spare laying aroud "just in case"...
"Seriously people, it's 2018 and you're not carrying more than one (type of) credit/debit card around with you? "
When you live in a country where each credit card costs at least 50 quid a year, you don't fill your wallet with them.
Fortunately cash is still popular here.
Gotta cringe anytime the media gets baited into lapping up the PR of Cashless or sucking on the empty promises of the likes of Stripe etc. Politicians especially need to be reminded to 'check' assumptions at the door. Nothing I say will change anything. Soon Facebook-Google et al, will decide who you can and can't send a payment to... 'Cashless choice'!
~~~
Sales Pitch:
~~~
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2018/0612/970015-moneyconf-dublin/
~~~
Versus Reality:
~~~
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43645676
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-18/-no-cash-signs-everywhere-has-sweden-worried-it-s-gone-too-far
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-11/maybe-dollars-should-be-digital
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/why-cashless-society-is-a-dangerous-idea-1.2869212
"We are aware there may have been some issues in processing a limited number of transactions earlier."
Limited number? I was about to leave work at 1800 when we started to get 100s of failures per minute. That's not a limited number. It was 100% of the attempted MC transactions.
"Limited" is a relative term.
A few hundred thousand transactions over a short period of tens/hundreds of millions of transactions per day is "limited" however the impact is still huge.
It's just playing with words to make it sound better. I do wonder if their "scheduled maintenance" was "planned" to cause an outage though - I suspect not...
Get bored with reiterating this, cash just works.
Bonus of no tracking your daily life as card use gives location, amount spent.
Lots of small shops are cash only below a certain amount due to huge card changes or do not even have a card reader at all (tills in local green grocers & butchers look ark vintage)
If you only shop at large chains then you might not notice that cash only is still a common thing.
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