TSYS payments outage hits customers

By Jeff Domansky

Four days ago, global payment processor TSYS platform went offline, and merchants and ISOs are still waiting for an explanation.

Neither the TSYS website nor the owner Global Payments have acknowledged the outage. In addition, neither company has yet issued a statement regarding the outage, leaving many ISOs and some merchants in the dark.

That lack of response to critical business payments infrastructure in the face of nationwide system outage is unacceptable today.

Shift4 and other TSYS platform users unable to process payments

The TSYS payment network went offline on Saturday night (Aug 21) sometime after 7:00 PM (MDT), although some merchants had reported occasional payment processing troubles as early as Friday.

Fans slam merchant processor failure

Payment processing company Shift4 Payments was just one of the large payment platform processors affected by the TSYS outage. As a result, some of its 200,000 retail, hospitality, leisure, and restaurant clients could not process payments.

This included tens of thousands of fans at the WWE SummerSlam event in Las Vegas who could not buy their beer and hot dogs. You can imagine the response on social media from outraged fans!

On Twitter, many more fans expressed similar complaints about payment transaction problems at ballparks and restaurants where merchants could not process payments. Other venues with outages included Petco Park and Allegiant Stadium.

The outage continued for two to three hours, although some merchants experienced problems into the next day. The only company explanation was a brief incident report on the TSYS merchant status system. Finally, the company status report claimed the issue was resolved at 9:58 PM (MDT).

payment processor outages

According to the company, the mix of “major” and “partial” outages affected various parts of its system, including Transaction Express (TXP) (Hosted, Virtual Terminal, ProcessNow / Mobile Payment Acceptance), TransIT (Merchant Center, Hosted, WebPASS / Virtual Terminal, CounterPASS/POS, MultiPASS / API Integration, Mobile Payment Acceptance), Transaction Central (Hosted, Virtual Terminal), and the TSYS Merchant Authorization Platform/Core (Saratoga, Sierra).

Other than that, crickets. No acknowledgment, no statement, no explanation on either company website or social media.

Somehow, that doesn’t feel good enough for such an important backbone of international payments, including retail and e-commerce. So ISOs and merchants have a right to expect better from Global Payments, a company that serves more than 3 million merchants, 1,300 financial institutions, and more than 600 million cardholders through more than 50 billion transactions every year.

In 2020, TSYS suffered a severe ransomware attack on Cayan, which it acquired in 2018 for $1 billion.

Are legacy systems up to the challenge?

payment outage questions

For ISOs and merchants, the outage is a reminder of the impact on a business when a payments network goes offline, whether through equipment or technology failure, cybersecurity attacks, or other system problems.

In recent years, mega processors have struggled with the cost and technology to modernize and integrate systems with so many mergers and acquisitions.

For merchants, it’s also prudent to ask whether your payment processor has adequate backup systems to cover similar problems in the future.

The next time WrestleMania or the Rolling Stones hit town, or on Black Friday or Christmas Eve, you can’t afford to have your payment systems fail.

SummerinSlam photo courtesy WWE

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