While Europe is still making sense of an international Visa outage in early June, fintech disruptor TransferWise experienced its own outage that lasted up to 11 hours on Thursday, with website, app and card payments unavailable to the company’s 1 million-plus users.
At some point in the morning of June 21 U.K. time, the TransferWise website started showing an error message to visitors proclaiming “technical issues” — at least one Twitter user claimed to have been without service since 10 a.m. The company issued a brief
At 2:07 p.m. another
A power outage in our data center is currently causing some technical issues that may affect our website, app, and card. Our team is already on it and working hard to get this sorted! Thank you for bearing with us 🙏
— TransferWise (@TransferWise)
June 21, 2018
With the website promising a speedy fix and no notifications sent out via email or on the company’s Facebook page, users resorted to Twitter to seek information and guidance when they found their cards being rejected and access to transfers via the app and website unavailable.
The outage bears some comparison with the recent massive failure of Visa systems across Europe on June 1, which was likewise
In that case the downtime had a rather more complex root cause — according to a
Visa Europe operates twin copies of its main system in “active-active” configuration, meaning that should the master fail, the backup always has the latest data in place ready to take over. This should, in theory, mean reliable operation at all times, but it seems there is still room for glitches if something prevents this fallback from taking effect.
Visa notes in its report that it is in the process of migrating its European data operations to its central VisaNet system, which operates four pairs of active-active systems and can boast 99.9995% reliability handling 319 billion transactions in the last few years. The migration is due to complete by the end of 2018.
Of course, a relatively youthful disruptor like TransferWise doesn’t have the clout or scale requirements of a global giant like Visa, so perhaps succumbing to an occasional data center issue is inevitable, but hopefully lessons are being learned and systems hardened against future failures.
Transferwise's Twitter feed quickly filled up with complaining users, many of them stuck in awkward situations abroad where they were relying on TransferWise’s low-cost currency exchange features to fund their travels.
Eventually the service came back online, with a
Throughout the incident, staff were busy responding to queries from concerned users, promising a speedy recovery and offering assistance with individual issues, but as of the time of writing some 24 hours after the incident started, no information has been posted to the company’s website or Facebook feed and no explanatory emails have been sent to users. TransferWise did not respond to an inquiry from PaymentsSource by deadline.
Data center issues are key to large online businesses, and server hosting facilities should be immune to power outages thanks to redundant power sources and in-house fallback power. Of course, occasional problems are inevitable, so additional redundancy on the customer side is usually advisable, with services falling back to backup systems hosted elsewhere should the main servers fail.
If this issue is indeed due to a simple power cut, it looks like TransferWise needs to expand and solidify its back-end systems to keep track with its recent surge of growth and expansion — the company recently
It’s also important to learn from the communication problems — an active Twitter feed is crucial, but it should not be the only means of informing users of ongoing issues.
