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The great bancard network breakdown
From: Bertrand Meyer <bertrand () eiffel com>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1993 11:22:28 -0700
The following is excerpted from Le Monde dated Tuesday, 29 June 1993, page 18. Translation and ellipses by Bertrand Meyer. A Black Week-End for Automatic Teller Machines THE GREAT BANKCARD NETWORK BREAKDOWN - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Background (from the end of the article) [All bankcards issued in France, but in France only, now have a built-in chip.] The famous [bankcard chip] has suffered many infantile problems. And for several months the Anglo-Saxon press has criticized French merchants, who sometimes reject foreign bankcards under the pretext that they don't have a chip. [Note by BM: I have a ``foreign'' card but have not encountered such a problem.] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Now for the recent incident: Last week-end was tough for many of the 21 million French people who have a bankcard. They had the unpleasant surprise of being almost unable to use it on Saturday the 26th and Sunday the 27th, whether to withdraw money from ATMs or to pay merchants. All because the computers in charge of authorizing payments to close to 40% of current cards were down for almost thirty hours. The loss to businesses, already hurt by the recession, is hard to evaluate; but the French bankcard system, touted as a little marvel of technology and safety, has just shown its limits. [...] The collapse was caused by a breakdown of the Sligos company's computers, which manage withdrawal and payment authorizations for close to half of the cards. Banks such as BNP and Societe Generale, which have their own computer servers for bankcard processing, were not affected. [Several paragraphs describe how various businesses tried to cope with the problem, with examples from Air France, Eurodisney etc.] On an average day transactions amount to five million operations amounting to 2 billion francs. The bankcard system has been presented as a symbol of the edge that French banks have acquired. What characterizes it in principle is both safety, thanks to the built-in chip, and flexibility, thanks to the ability for cardholders to withdraw money from 17,400 ATMs and buy from 520,000 merchants. But the system had already shown worrying signs of fragility. Last autumn [...] some operations were charged twice. The history of bankcards in France goes back to the beginning of the seventies with the creation of the GIE [consortium] ``Carte Bleue'', followed in 1984 by another GIE called Carte Bancaire [Bank Card]. [...] In ten years of constant investments amounting to several billion francs, the little plastic card has acquired a hologram and a chip and [...] has become indispensable. It seems incredible, then, that safety and relay mechanisms, as present in all sensitive computer systems, were not able to prevent last weekend's giant breakdown. Aside from a few isolated cases [DETAILS PLEASE! BM] the 30-hour service interruption has not had any really tragic consequences; it could have if the system's functioning had been interrupted for a longer period. One may indeed wonder whether the forced-march development of electronic money, ``monetics'', does not put a country's economy at the mercy of a breakdown. Last year more than two billion operations were performed in France with bankcards, for a total amount of 718 billion francs, 475 billion for payments and 243 billion for withdrawals.
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