Author: Lily Hay Newman / Source: WIRED
On Friday, Visa’s payment network suffered outages across Europe, limiting transactions for both businesses and individuals. Banks and commerce groups began advising customers to use cash or other payment cards if possible, and reports indicated that online and contactless transactions were having more success than chip cards.
Though some Visa transactions still went through, the failure appeared widespread. The Financial Times even reported that some ATMs in the United Kingdom were already out of cash within a couple of hours of the first outage reports. Some observers saw in the outage a stark reminder of the fragility of payment networks, and the weaknesses in global economic platforms.
There were no immediate signs that the outages were a result of a cyberattack or other foul play, but Visa was quiet for hours about the source of the failure—reinforcing how complex these massive payment systems are and how difficult it is to recover from problems once they cascade out of control.
“The world’s payment networks are incredibly centralized, a small number of actors control a large percent of all money flows,” says Emin Gün Sirer, a distributed systems researcher at Cornell University. “This not only has implications for all of us regular people, but it also has implications for national security. These networks have implicitly become part of our critical infrastructure.”
A Visa spokesperson said in a statement that, “Visa is currently experiencing a…
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