E-Processor technical problems halt online gambling payments
News on 19 Jul 2016
News on 19 Jul 2016
The London-listed e-processor WorldPay is creating problems for e-commerce companies – including online gambling firms – due to technical problems that have knocked it offline for the past two weeks.
The Financial Times reports that millions of payments daily are affected by the technical outage, leaving many customers unable to receive payments from the companies using WorldPay.
The newspaper notes that online sports betting provider Stan James has had to use social media to apologise to its players for the delays in payments and inconvenience, triggering some angry responses.
In a public statement apologising for the outage, WorldPay explained that it was “experiencing an isolated issue with one of its gateways which is affecting a very small proportion of our customers (substantially less than 1 percent) and a small proportion of the transactions that we process daily”.
One insider told the newspaper that the problem had been caused by an overload of error messages in one of its payment processing servers caused by the recent introduction of new software and system changes.
The surge in messages meant the server needed to be taken offline and the outstanding batch payments had to be reconciled manually for some customers of its high capacity gateway, which handles millions of payments a day.
“We have been working daily with Worldpay to resolve the issue, yet Worldpay are telling our customers that there is no problem with the gateway – which is untrue,” said an executive at one unidentified online gambling company affected by the outage.
He revealed that he had reported the issue to the Financial Conduct Authority.
The National Lottery also took to Twitter to advise players that it was “working closely with Worldpay and they expect this issue to be resolved shortly” after a customer complained he had been waiting eight days for a refund of more than GBP 1,000.
The FT notes that Worldpay spent GBP 400 million to build a new platform with the capacity to handle more than 325 different payment methods around the world.
