SEATTLE – Members at BECU and hundreds of credit unions had their cards rejected at CO-OP Financial ATMs Friday as a result of a disruption in the system at processor Fidelity National Information Systems.
BECU said hundreds of its members were affected. "The third-party network that handles debit card transactions nationally for a number of banks and credit unions crashed on Friday," said the credit union. "It disrupted BECU members' transactions for a few hours. The network is currently recovering and is processing transactions again. It will be a few hours before it’s at 100 percent."
Customers at hundreds of banks were also affected.
The glitch caused credit card and ATM transactions over the CO-OP system to be denied starting around noon Pacific Standard Time and running until around 6 or 6:30 p.m., according to Caroline Lane, senior vice president of business development and marketing at the CO-OP. “By 6:30 all transactions were back to normal,” Lane told the Credit Union Journal Sunday.
It meant that debit cards could not be used at ATMs or in stores.
The cause of the outage was still be investigated. but Fidelity National Information notified CO-OP and its other customers that the problems originated with its system.
