If yesterday, Thursday 28 November 2024you found yourself unable to make an electronic payment via POS with the ATM, Pagobancomat and Nexi circuits, or an online payment with services such as PayPal or a withdrawal from ATMsyou were not the only ones. In fact, starting from 11.25am yesterday, there was a widespread problem throughout Italy in paying in contactless mode, which affected many users, as can be seen from the reports collected by Downdetector (famous collaborative portal in which individual users send reports of disruptions affecting various types of services).
According to data provided by Downdetectorthe inconveniences – which had stopped yesterday evening – would have started again this morning: the reporting curves, at the time we are writing this article, are in fact rising upwards. The cause, as reported by the French company Worldlinea global leader in payments processing, resides in a general outage of its network in Italy.
Problems with ATM and POS payments: the causes
The fault that affected the payment circuits is attributed to ainterruption of the connection of Worldline’s Italian data centersa company that handles electronic payment processing for many banks in Europe. Worldline is investigating what happened. In an official note he explained that the main cause that gave rise to the disservice has been identified (although problems and malfunctions still seem to affect many users). The company in this case explained:
Worldline services have been affected by connection problems to its data centers in Italy due to a third-party operator’s network outage. The root cause of the outage has been identified. Local authority gas pipeline installation work has severely damaged our supplier’s cables and network. Restoration work by our supplier is expected to begin later today (November 28, Ed.). The impacts are mainly localized in Italy, with effects in some other markets. In the meantime, Worldline is working tirelessly to identify potential alternative solutions to reactivate services, pending the restoration of physical infrastructure. Worldline is working closely with the network operator to monitor the progress of the restoration work.
The reports of the downturn in electronic payments could continue today
The affair involved several banking institutions, including BPER Bank And BPM deskin addition to the circuits VISA And MasterCardwith widespread malfunctions also in the services of various Italian banks, such as Intesa Sanpaolo. It is not yet clear whether yesterday’s interruption will be repeated today and whether it will do so with the same extent, but the reporting curves on Downdetector they suggest that the problems may not be over, so we suggest you bring some cash with you in case you are affected by the critical issues encountered by many other users in the past few hours.
