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.