Temporary outage of Visa card network Sunday

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By MARCY GORDON

WASHINGTON (AP) - A technical problem affecting the Visa network barred some people around the United States from using their credit and debit cards for about 45 minutes on Sunday, the company said.

The outage was caused by a recent update Visa has made to its system, said Visa Inc. spokeswoman Sandra Chu. She said Visa had trouble processing some transactions as a result, but the system is operating normally now.

Chu said the problem Sunday was unrelated to the security breach potentially affecting Visa and MasterCard customers that was reported Friday by credit card processor Global Payments Inc.

The outage occurred from around 2:40 p.m. to 3:20 p.m. EDT, a person from a major bank said. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because bank employees were not authorized to speak publicly. Visa had notified the banks that are members of its network of the problem.

Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20120402/D9TSEVK80.html

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This file photo taken Tuesday, May 3, 2011 shows a Visa card in a wallet in Richardson, Texas. A technical problem affecting the Visa network barred people from using their credit and debit cards for about 45 minutes on Sunday, April 1, 2012, the company said. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

[RZM]

1. Interesting. The woman in line ahead of me at the grocery store today had her card declined

I just assumed it was for the normal reasons. I used my visa right after her with no problem.

[Gibby]

2. Mercury is RetroGroady

'splains everytink

naturally

[MNBrewer]

3. It happened while I was at the nursery picking up some plants.

[rocktivity]

4. Worst. April's Fools Day. Joke. Ever.

rocktivity

[seattleblah]

5. When you put Republicans in charge of something...

of course it quits working! Nothing surprising here.

[freshwest]

6. +1

[Grassy Knoll]

7. EXACTLY ......

[turntxblue]

8. Ours was declined today

I suppose that explains it. Both mine and my husband's Visa (different accounts) were declined at the restaurant where we ate lunch. The person checking out ahead of us was declined, too. The cashier knew all of us, and knew that the problem was not likely with our cards. Fortunately, they took our check, as we had little cash with us. Usually, I find it very embarrassing to be declined, but this time it seemed pretty clear that somewhere there was a glitch in the system.

Thanks for posting the article.

[Odin2005]

9. It affected my debit card when I was paying for groceries.

I had to write a check.

[Brickbat]

10. I was traveling yesterday and tried to buy some gas; all I had was my Visa check card.

Middle of Iowa. Kind of a pain in the ass.