Saturday October 21, a technical failure at Worldline, a payment solutions provider, had an impact on bank card transactions in many brands in France. Explanations.
The first day of the All Saints’ Day holidays was quite a mess in certain shops and restaurant chains. Indeed, yesterday, early in the afternoon, an unexpected outage affected the electronic payment terminals (TPE) of several major brands such as Auchan, Carrefour, Ikea, Lidl, McDonald’s and Monoprix. Not only did this failure prevent payments by bank card, but it also caused queues to lengthen as well as the dissatisfaction of customers who had no other means to pay for their purchases and meals.
Transactions disrupted between 12:30 p.m. and 1:20 p.m.
By examining the outages reported by Visa card holders on the Downdetector site, the incident appeared around 12:30 p.m. and continued until 3:50 p.m. before finally resolving in the early evening.
According to our colleagues at Figaro, it would not be a cyberattack nor a technical problem with the bank card payment network, but a computer failure at Worldline, a French TPE supplier. According to AFP, which managed to contact the group’s spokesperson in the afternoon, one of the company’s payment platforms encountered transaction disruptions between 12:30 p.m. and 1:20 p.m.
A gradual return to normal
Although Worldline’s technical teams quickly took the necessary measures to resolve the problem, the return to normal of bank card payments will have taken a little longer than announced in store, again according to information provided by Downdetector.
And as for the exact extent of the outage and the number of brands and customers affected, we currently have no further details.
Sources: Le Figaro, The echoes
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