2023-10-21 18:18:00
Mayhem at the checkout of several brands this Saturday. Customers of Carrefour, McDonald’s and SNCF, among others, were unable to pay for their purchases with their bank card. “I tested for you: working in a supermarket and suffering a national credit card reader outage, on a Saturday during rush hour,” laments Hugo, on X. While the French are increasingly favoring payments dematerialized, some had no other choice than to leave, abandoning their basket or shopping trolley. “The national bank card outage is driving me crazy. It will teach me not to have other means of payment with me every time,” sighs, still on X, M8 Seneo.
Quickly, messages, amused or furious, rained down on social networks, like rumors of a cyber-attack… They reported problems in particular at Carrefour, McDonald’s, the SNCF, but also Monoprix, Auchan and Ikea. A McDonald’s spokesperson confirmed “a national outage” which has affected stores “since midday”.
“This is not a cyber attack”
“This is not a cyber-attack, nor a problem with the bank card payment network, but an incident limited to certain brands which rely on the same provider of electronic payment solutions”, indicates to Parisien-Aujourd’hui in France the Economic Interest Group of bank cards, which defines the operating methods of payment by bank card.
This is Worldline, a French fintech (portmanteau word made up of “finance” and “technology”), world leader in securing payments and transactions. “Around 12:30 p.m. and until 1:20 p.m., Worldline encountered some transaction disruptions on one of its payment platforms,” explains a company spokesperson. The latter would have “identified the problem”, which was “being resolved” during the day, according to the bank cards GIE.
At the end of the afternoon, the problem seemed resolved in certain stores. “We were impacted for less than an hour at midday,” said a Monoprix representative. For other stores and businesses, the return to normal took longer, due to a reactivation of the system which requires “a little more time”, according to Worldline. “Our teams are fully mobilized. We are monitoring with them the proper restoration of services,” the fintech said.
If this Saturday’s computer outage occurred on a national scale, the precise number of brands and customers affected was not yet known this Saturday evening.
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