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 …

[Plest]

"driven by an equipment change issue"

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!

[Richard Jones 1]

Testing

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.

[Keythong]

Re: Testing

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.

[BrownishMonstr]

Re: Testing

Except you receive a bug report of something not working, but you expect it's because the required data doesn't exist in the 3rd party sandbox account, but you still spend hours because you don't want to be wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust?

Too many companies trust in magical thinking.

That extensive testing is not necessary.

That failed testing can be fixed in production.

That customers won't notice if they fix it quickly.

That anything can be fixed quickly.

[Keythong]

Re: Trust?

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.

[IGotOut]

Intresting...

...I tried to use their appaling payment system today and it bitched about me blocking cookies and couldn't proceed. Given I only block 3rd party ones, I decided to dump that method and use Paypal instead.

Not sure if its related or not.

[Sp0ck]

Re: Intresting...

I had the exact same issue yesterday, with the same resolution. Gotta be related.

[Peter 39]

Surprised they're still in business. I used them for a while from the US and they hassled mightily about "verification".

And then a bit over a year ago they just shut down here. No advance notice. Just on the bike and away.

S'house way to run a company.

[Worldpay]

Worldpay Testing

More testing should have been done here then #stubbdata!!! Oh yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear

How sad

Never mind

[Muscleguy]

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.