VISA Customers Declined on Sunday, Payment Processor Hacked on Friday

If you tried to used your VISA credit or debit card around the on Sunday and it was declined there are two reason: you either didn't have the correct amount of cash or line of credit; or your are one of many who experienced VISA's outage.

No, it wasn't the company's attempt at humor. A technical problem affecting the Visa network prevented some people from beng able to use the credit and debit cards for about 45 minutes on Sunday, the company said.

The outage was caused by a recent update Visa has made to its system, Visa Inc. spokeswoman Sandra Chu told Associated Press. She said Visa had trouble processing some transactions as a result, but said the system is operating normally now.

The outage occurred from around 1:40 p.m. to 2:20 p.m. CST, according to Associated Press, which also states VISA said the declinations were unrelated to a security breach announced Friday, which potentially affects serveral credit provider's customers.

VISA Payment Processor Removed from Approved List

VISA has removed the payment processor that announced the hack, Global Payments Inc., from its list of approved service providers.

Global Payments made the announcement that the relatively huge cyber intrusion could expose Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover card holders to fraud.

Global Payments said it believes fewer than 1.5 million credit card numbers were stolen in the cyber security breach.

"We are making rapid progress torward bringing this issue to a close," said Global Chairman and CEO Paul Garcia on Sunday.

Global Processing's Track 2 card data was stolen but card holders' names, addresses and Social Security numbers were not obtained, according to the company, which also believes the affected part of its processing system is confined to North America.

A person improperly using Track 2 information can transfer the account number and expiration date of a card to a magnetic stripe on a fraudulent card and then try to use it to make online purchases, Washington Post is reporting.

The attempt could be blocked if an online merchant asks for the CVV code, or the three or four digits usually located on the back of card.

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