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Posted on 04/04/2004 1:11:22 PM PDT by TexKat
A computer hardware problem caused more than 800,000 credit card transactions to be double- or triple-billed last week at stores nationwide, including Wal-Mart, officials said.
Staci Busby, a spokeswoman for First Data Corp., an electronic payments processor, said Sunday the excess charges on MasterCard and Visa accounts had been reversed. She said she did not know details of the hardware problem.
Busby was unable to say how many customers were affected by the 800,000 transaction errors, but said they involved retailers including Wal-Mart.
"Anyone who conducted a transaction with a Visa or Mastercard on March 31 should check their statements," she said.
The errors were posted to customers' accounts on April 1. "First Data corrected the problem as soon as we discovered it," Busby said.
Busby said besides publicizing a toll-free hot line, Greenwood Village-based First Data was calling affected customers. She said some people may not see the reversed charges on their accounts until Tuesday.
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Danetta Thompson said cashiers were told about the mix-up and store signs were posted with First Data's toll-free number - 888-893-0626.
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A glitsch may just be the excuse they are giving to the sheeple. It could be the outsourcing glitsch, like the outsourcing food stamp helpdesk, or it could be the terrorist test glitsch.
And for this they keep hiking the service fees?
This is NOT a hardware problem.
Here's what I'll bet happened: They ran the nightly batch job to process that day's transactions. Then the computer crashed. (Yes, a hardware problem, but these things happen all the time.) Then they rebooted the computer and restarted the nightly batch job from the beginning - without first rolling back the previous transactions.
IOW, it was a management or operations or operator error.
When was the concept of rollback-able transactions invented anyway - the '70s or something???
EXACTLY.
I have been running batch processes on mainframes for 12 years.
STEP 1: Backup
When you have a crash, you restore the backup before restarting the job.
This was exactly what you said, operator and supervisor error.
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