Worldpay stops turning in the UK, leaving trail of thoroughly miffed retailers and customers Global online payment provider Worldpay is experiencing an ongoing outage affecting businesses and organisations in the UK. The company, acquired by FIS in July 2019 for $43bn, said in a statement to The Register: "Worldpay from FIS is experiencing processing issues in certain markets believed to be driven by an equipment …
I love that, I'm using that one next time!
So usual stuff, weekend upgrade change request was tested badly ( if at all ) when it went through UAT and when customers actually used it on Monday morning the system fell apart.
This morning we saw a certain well known bank did some upgrades on their SFTP servers over the weekend, they replayed old files from last month through amd left them in place, we nearly double processed our data if our autoprocess checks hadn't caught them when they came through!
Let's see, testing budget less than a tea club funds, OK customers can be testers for a day, all costs to them and their unfortunates, sorry customers. Net cost to us zero. Good, the tea club can live another day.
Shame the same cannot be said of the cowboys ruining, not running the show who earned their P45s but may now miss out on their rewards.
I was not popular in test schedule meetings when I tried to slip in a few real word uses and insist that tests were passed. During testing was when the tin cans rattled, but customer service was spared the SNAFU.
Costs can be shocking if customers overload your systems/infrastructure or cause harmful other events, like toxic data or security compromises; ... like World Pay!
Testing should include some (sanitised) saved real data, because users and systems can do the damned unexpected stuff; been there! Also load testing to check for overload of systems/infrastructure or race condition failures, and input fuzzing, excessive input, and specific exploit testing, to check for inadequate input validation and for security issues.
Quickly is a relative term; more than a few seconds to a few minute of disruption can cause retail customers to shop elsewhere or not at all, this is why gradual change can be a better strategy, supported by indirect access points, like load balancing.
I've given up on some retailers for several months, and killed my ebay account, because of frustrating payment failures, despite solid credit; so loath using Paypal as a credit card payment channel anywhere, so Worldpay should be a lot more careful.
I can confirm, I volunteer in a Charity shop & was on yesterday. No worldpay card payments in the morning. A call to them said everyone in the local area was affected. It was back up after lunch though in time for my stint on the door managing the queue was swapped for behind the till. So I escaped the worst of it.
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