June 1, Visa payment system has experienced a failure that affected the use of credit cards and payment processing in the European Union, Ireland and even in the United States. Reportedly, the problem is solved, but the fact that it occurred indicates the need to implement a decentralized and stable alternative systems, where such incidents impossible.
In his official statement on Twitter the Visa company announced that its payment processing service is experiencing outages:
We are currently experiencing a service disruption which is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed. We are investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation. We will keep you updated.
— VisaNewsEurope (@VisaNewsEurope) June 1, 2018
At the moment we are faced with a service interruption that prevents the processing of some Visa transactions in Europe. We are investigating the cause and are working to quickly rectify the situation. We will keep you updated.
It is reported that Visa users have faced serious problems when paying by card. They had received reports of “interruption of service” that did not allow them to receive or send money.
Crashing could also seriously affect banking institutions. There have been reports of queues in front of ATMs where people tried to withdraw more cash, fearing a prolonged outage.
June 2, almost 20 hours after the Visa has recognized a failure, it has published on its website an announcement saying that the problem is solved. However, you should stress the fundamentally important point. Millions of people use the services of Visa worldwide, and it is unclear how many people at this time was affected. One thing is clear: this collection is characterized for centralized service providers, and may be repeated.
In an official statement, Visa said that the failure was caused by unspecified “system failure”. This incident clearly indicates the need for alternatives, such as bitcoin, which are immune to such “systemic failures”.
Technology, decentralization may prevent the recurrence of the situation, and it is worth noting that Visa itself is not against their introduction. In October 2016, the company announced that it is working on a blockchain-solution for cross-border money transfers for corporate clients (and MasterCard recently filed a patent application for a blockchain system check consumer coupons).
Anyway, amid the chaos caused by the shutdown of Visa, sounded simple truth:
Visa network goes down today.
Bitcoin has never gone down.
— Bitcoin (@btc) June 1, 2018
The Visa network of today has fallen. With bitcoin this will never happen.
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