Visa blackout: are you owed compensation?

Visa’s blackout last week left millions of people unable to pay and many businesses struggling to accept payments. Here’s how you might be claim compensation if you were affected.

Many Visa customers could be owed compensation after the payment firm suffered huge technical problems last Friday.

A hardware issue meant that Visa struggled to process payments between roughly 2:30pm and 10pm across Europe. It left millions of customers unable to use their cards in stores while online payments were also rejected. 

The failure was especially embarrassing for Visa as it coincided with its new "fast and easy payments" World Cup ad campaign.

Tap and pay the fast and easy way with Visa contactless, just like Zlatan #PayLikeZlatan #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/bRrYHCVOXh

— Visa UK (@VisaUK) May 29, 2018

How customers were affected

For customers who didn't have an alternative way of paying (ie Mastercard, Amex or plain old cash), they could have lost out in a number of ways.

For example, you could have had to use another card that has a worse exchange rate if you are abroad, or missed a train because you couldn’t pay for a ticket and missed an event as a result.

What's more, some cardholders have now discovered that Visa double- or even triple-charged them during the blackout.

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Money was taken from their account every time their card was declined.

To make matters worse, card providers and banks have said they can’t reimburse people for the money.

Instead, they have to wait for Visa to reimburse them, which could take weeks.

What happened?

Visa’s payment outage was due to a technical problem with its back-end processing system.

This is the part where Visa communicates with your bank to enable a payment, but it kept going on and offline throughout Friday afternoon meaning many payments failed.

To get an idea of how many people were affected Visa’s system can process over 65,000 transactions a second – and it had problems for around six hours.

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How to get compensation

If you’ve had multiple transactions processed on your account then the first thing to do is contact your bank.

You won’t have actually lost any money – the transactions will have just led to that money being ringfenced as a ‘pending transaction’ meaning you can’t spend it on other things.

Visa says it is working to get all the money released as soon as possible but how long this will take can vary hugely from one customer to the next. 

If you have lost out financially by any other method then you should gather any evidence you can and inform your bank that you want to make a claim for compensation.

Despite it being a Visa failure, it's them you'll need to go through for this. MoneySainvgExpert chatted to some of the big banks and they've encouraged affected customers to come forward.

Be prepared for the next failure

It seems IT failures are becoming more prevalent across the finance sector.

You can avoid problems in the future by having a backup payment option, ideally from a different payment provider, such as Mastercard or American Express. 

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