Can you provide a single news source for this hysterical claim?

Google News provides not one single reference. Other than a single ridiculous story someone provided about two idiots trying to block a (presumably credit card-related) satellite interface with aluminum foil, this is entirely unsubstantiated nonsense.

Do you honestly believe that what goes on at your store reflects the state of the country as a whole?

The total absence of even a mention of this in any mass media or trade media is suspect.

I work - directly - with the credit card companies, there are MANY payment networks, not one. Your Visa card may be processed on Discover's networks and vice versa. There are peering agreements, there are backups, there are store-and-forward tools.

This was NOT - not not not - a national issue. It may not have been more than a local issue, or even a single merchant or authorization gateway provider. Authorize.net could go down and thousands of merchants would unable to process cards, but hundreds of millions of entities would not even notice.

Don't post stuff like this here unless you're ready and able to cite the full story.

Martin, I don't claim to work directly with the credit card companies, you and SHERPADOG do.

I am just a stupid shopkeep messenger who posted what VISA told us for several hours. Who ever VISA is that answers our calls stated that 85% of their system was down and they could not process 40,000 transactions per minute. That is all that I know.

SHERPADOG posted a polite correction to my post - "If you are using First Data services which processes Envoy, Nabanco, CES and a couple of others, yes their system is down and should be back online shortly." I thank SHERPADOG for that.

Martin, I am just a stupid shopkeep messenger that could not find any reference on local media or the internet either. Maybe you and SHERPADOG, two insiders, can enlighten us pleebs. To quote an old phrase with attitude - "Don't post stuff like this here unless you're ready and able to cite the full story."

I work for a large bank, we had no credit card issues and I was personally shopping and dining between 5 and 8 all on credit/debit cards, there was not major us outage.

My guess it the credit processor your store uses had a nationwide outage but not the visa network.

In Cliff's defense, I too notice sometimes, that something is out of the ordinary, try to see how extensive it is, and then get on the net (if I can) and ask around to find out if others are noticing the same event in their areas.

Yes, I am paranoid about a few things.

I fully realize how an insignificant event can (and has) been confused as the start of a major event by the superpowers in the past. The Norwegians launching a weather rocket from their northern end almost had Yeltsin launching Russia's Missiles because their computers were telling them that the USA had launched a pre-emptive strike. Despite having had a few vodka's, Boris knew that there was no reason for us to attack them, so he waited for the missile to hit. It didn't hit and Boris closed their version of the "football" thus NOT starting WWIII on bad information.

In this day and age, I do not expect our govt or the MSM to announce that the city of Moscow is being evacuated for unknown reasons, or Beijing, or any other significant event occurring that would be indicative of a catastrophe being planned or executed.

Perhaps the wording should be a little different as well as the phrasing. Ask a question if anybody else has run into such & such problem within the last few, minutes or hours.

Questions such as that might be the first indications that any of us may get of a major event occurring. Just my views of course.

I always refer people to this page here as it describes in easy to understand terms on how credit cards are processed.

There a literally hundreds if not thousands of Acquirer's and yes they do have their share of tech related issues and do go down from time to time such was the case yesterday.

These days the downtimes are a lot less for many of the reasons Martin alluded to....but it only takes one malfunction to really mess things up.

When I am back at work on Monday, I will see if anyone knows what transpired with First Data...

I would agree with wildman.

The internet is a double edged sword. We are all reporters of news of world-wide (in many cases) events that can travel much quicker through the web than CNN, etc.

Since many of us are not trained as journalists (after quickly perusing some of the profiles) or have the time to fact-check something before posting (posting at work or on the run) a query we are at risk for passing along misinformation.

However, many of us because of our training / careers are expert observers and documenters.

That is our strength (many eyes and ears).

In order to prevent confusion, it is a wise course of action to differentiate between reporting observed data and drawing conclusions and communicate the difference.

"I observe 'x' happening in my area"
"Has anyone else observed 'x' in their area?"
"I suspect 'y' is happening, anyone else got any ideas?"

As we collect more information then, we can start drawing much more accurate conclusions.

I appreciate the heads-up, and am re-evaluating our the family emergency cash plan as a result.

A credit card company is probably just like a lot of other companies. When something good happens, they tell everyone. When something bad happens, they tell no one.

Just for the record, this morning at 4:30 am EST, my local (Tampa, Florida) 7-11 was not able to process credit/debit card transactions. Thankfully, I had ten bucks cash on me. the misses doesn't normally allow me to carry cash, a good thing seeing as how i can not hold on to it.

-Bill Liptak