Visa payments system outage causes chaos
TL;DR
Partial switch failure prevented backup activation, causing 5.2 million failed payments across Europe in 10 hours.
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Case study of Visa Europe hardware failure illustrating both risks of centralization (European region went down) and benefits of distribution (other regions continued operating).
Key Findings from News (2018)
- 51.2 million transactions initiated during outage, 5.2 million failed (10.2% failure rate)
- UK specifically saw 2.4 million of 27.6 million transactions fail (8.7% failure rate)
- Peak disruption periods saw 35% transaction failure rates
- Outage lasted 10 hours (14:35 to 00:45 BST) on Friday 1 June 2018
- Root cause: 'rare partial failure' in primary switch prevented backup from activating
- Bank of England used statutory powers to direct implementation of independent review