News

Processing hiccups in U.S, Germany, Australia linked to software, year change

January 10, 2010

Digital Transactions reports that processing glitches struck in Germany and Australia over the past week apparently involved applications that couldn't properly handle the change in year on Jan. 1. The issues behind processing glitches felt in the United States remain murky.

In the United States, some customers of CyberSource Corp., which provides gateway and related services for 284,000 merchants, experienced problems submitting transactions through the CyberSource processing software they host on their own computers. CyberSource was sending a patch to the affected customers, numbered fewer than 20.

One of those customers was the 23,000-student Washington State University. John Chapman, IT applications manager at WSU, says the processing outage started in the late afternoon of Dec. 31 and lasted until the university installed the patch on Tuesday.

Instead of going through the CyberSource gateway, WSU's CyberSource Payment Manager system routes transactions to processor TSYS Acquiring Solutions. TSYS informed WSU that the CyberSource software was interpreting its response messages incorrectly.

Problems overseas seemed to be far larger, especially in Germany. According to various news reports, up to 30 million EMV-chip cards became unusable at the start of the year. That's when customers of some German banks began reporting problems with ATM withdrawals and card payments. The problem affected so-called electronic cash or "giro" cards issued by public-sector financial institutions. The cards were unable to recognize the year change.

French chip card maker Gemalto said it would "promptly deploy a solution." Banks said they would not have to reissue cards because customers could have them repaired by inserting them into ATMs, but the fix could take a week.

In Australia, some merchant terminals serviced by payment processors Keycorp Ltd. and First Data Corp. and deployed on behalf of two banks on Jan. 1 began recording payments as having occurred in January 2016. Keycorp said the problem originated with its software, according to the ZDNet Australia news service. The fix involved entering a series of keystrokes and took only a few minutes, Keycorp's chief executive told ZDNet. The last problems had been corrected by Wednesday.