Banks apologise for debit and credit card fault

The company behind a fault in many debit and credit cards today said a systems slowdown was the cause.

Total System Services, Inc, TSYS, released a statement to say the problem, which affected many Irish cardholders, had been fixed.

“A systems slowdown at TSYS’ UK data centre impacted its ability to provide timely payment authorisations for some of its European clients for a period of time on Friday, 10 May 2013. Systems are now running normally and transactions are being processed as usual.”

Some Visa Debit cardholders could not use their cards for a brief period after a fault in the system involving AIB and Permanent TSB.

A spokeswoman for AIB said the fault affected all credit cards, even though it was initially believed to only have affected Visa Debit cards. She added that it was caused by a third-party and fixed in less than an hour.

A spokesman from Permanent TSB said only their customers with Visa Debit cards were affected when and ATM withdrawals were not affected. He added that it would not be appropriate to name the third-party provider involved in the glitch, but that it was a technical issue and not a security threat.

Permanent TSB tweeted an apology to its customers saying: “Visa Debit Card Issue Update: Visa Debit is now back working at POS & ATM’s. We are very sorry for the inconvenience this caused customers!”

AIB also took to Twitter to apologise, saying: “An earlier issue with Visa Debit and Visa Credit Cards has now been resolved. Difficulties arose due to a technical problem with a third party service provider. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

“AIB will ensure that any accounts affected will be corrected as soon as possible.”

A Visa Europe spokesman said visa systems have been operating normally all day, servicing Visa debit, credit and prepaid transactions.

The number of people affected by the fault has not yet been revealed, but over one million AIB cardholders may have been affected.

A spokeswoman for Bank of Ireland confirmed that none of their cards were affected by the glitch.

TSYS have been involved in Irish business since 2001 and have 8,000 employees worldwide.