Bank of England takes Visa to task over outage
(8 March 2019 – United Kingdom) Following a widespread outage last year for Visa the Bank of England is taking supervisory action against the card scheme.
More than five million transactions across Europe failed during Visa's 10 hour outage in June last year following a failure of a component in its primary data centre.
Immediately following the incident, Visa Europe engaged an external party to conduct an independent review, with the scope agreed with both the Bank and the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR).
Despite Visa's commitment to the remediation actions, the Bank of England says that it intends to use its statutory to direct the card scheme to fully implement the recommendations of the independent review.
As a further action, it is also using its powers to require Visa Europe to appoint an independent third party, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), to assess the company's progress in implementing the recommendations.
In a statement, the central bank says: "The incident resulted in widespread disruption to users of Visa Europe’s services and had the potential to affect confidence in the financial system. The Bank’s action is proportionate to the nature and impact of the incident."
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