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Date Posted: 22:53:51 12/29/99 Wed
Author: GF
Subject: Massive Credit Card Failure In UK

Source: Las Vegas Sun http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/1999/dec/29/122900185.html

Here's a significant, widely unreported (haven't heard a thing yet on CNN or even the BBC) isolated pre-incident:

Today: December 29, 1999 at 16:32:56 PST

Y2K Bug Triggers Credit Card Snafu
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) -- A Y2K-triggered failure in credit card swipe machines caused frustrating delays for thousands of retailers and customers trying to ring up purchases across Britain on Wednesday.

The machines, manufactured by Racal Electronics and supplied by HSBC, one of Britain's largest four banks, improperly rejected credit cards because of a failure to recognize the year 2000, a bank spokeswoman said.

Merchants who tried to swipe Mastercard and Visa cards through some 20,000 machines beginning on Tuesday found they were improperly rejected, said HSBC spokeswoman Nicolette Dawson.

Lines grew as retailers were forced to telephone for further authorization.

The failure, characterized as minor by Dawson, comes just days before the New Year, when most Y2K glitches are expected to begun to be felt. Experts say the seriousness of disruptions will depend on the quality of Y2K remediation.

The so-called millennium bug stems from programming that expressed years in two digits. Left uncorrected, the bug causes computers and microcircuits to mistake the year 2000 for 1900. Faulty fixes can also be a problem.

In both cases, systems can fail or corrupt data.

Dawson said HSBC failure occurred because some of the bank's new swipe card terminals are programmed to look ahead four working days in processing transactions.

"The problem was with the terminals not the cards," she said. "There's no way any customers would be inconvenienced."

She said the problem was expected to disappear by Jan. 1.

In the meantime, shopkeepers were advised that in lieu of telephoning for authorization they could process cards by pressing a sequence of keys into the terminals before swiping the card.

An HSBC helpline was set up to help them through the sequence.

[How is she so sure the problem will disappear on Jan 1?? Crystal ball? GF]

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