The Treasury Committee’s chair has written to Visa’s European chief executive to find out what went wrong on Friday 1 June, how Visa will ensure that a similar failure does not happen again, and whether customers or merchants will be entitled to compensation.

Nicky Morgan commented that given a third of all spending in the UK is processed by Visa, stating that “it is deeply worrying that such a vital part of the country’s payment infrastructure can fail so catastrophically”.

Many consumers and businesses were left stranded for the duration of the evening and until the ‘hardware failure’ was resolved the following morning, unable to make or accept payments, with chaos reported in shops across Europe.

The committee has asked Hogg to answer its questions on the disruption. If it is not satisfied with the response, it may consider asking her to provide oral evidence.

Morgan’s letter to Hogg asked:

• When did Visa first become aware of the failure, and when were you personally informed of it?
• For how long were you aware of the system failure before issuing your first public statement on the incident?
• How many Visa cards were affected by the system failure, and how many of those were issued in the UK?
• What determined whether or not a given Visa card was affected?
• You have stated that the incident was caused by a hardware failure. What led to this hardware failure, and what controls do you have in place to prevent such failures from occurring?
• Some merchants were left unable to accept any card payments, even those taking place over an alternative card network ( e.g. MasterCard). Why did a Visa system failure prevent some non-Visa transactions from taking place?
• Does Visa operate a backup processing site? If so, why was processing not switched to this site to ensure service continuity?
• Have any cardholders seen money leave their accounts for transactions that were not, in fact, completed?
• Will any cardholders or merchants be entitled to compensation from Visa?
• What steps will you be taking to ensure a similar system failure does not happen again?

Shortly after 10pm on Friday, Visa said its services were operating at close to normal levels, before releasing a second statement six hours later assuring users the problems had been completely resolved.

“The issue was the result of a hardware failure within one of our European systems and is not associated with any unauthorised access or cyberattack,” the statement read.

Another statement issued on Saturday evening explained that while the technical issue had been resolved, “a small number of cardholders may have pending transactions that could be limiting their spending ability”.

Share Story: