Moneris Restores Service After ‘Glitch’ Cuts off POS Traffic in Canada

While American consumers were flocking to the stores on Friday and whipping out their credit and debit cards for payment, their Canadian counterparts were forced to find cash, their checkbooks, or to come back later because the network of the nation's largest merchant acquirer went down for two and a half hours. Moneris Solutions Corp. reports that a software problem in its main processing switch that began about 4 p.m. Eastern time left its merchants unable to process any credit or debit card transactions until about 6:30 p.m. A spokesperson for Toronto-based Moneris, which has 300,000 merchant locations, did not have details Monday morning about the technical nature of the problem. The problem, however, did not arise from heavy volume or insufficient capacity, Moneris reports. Nor does there appear to be evidence of outside tampering. “All indications point to an internal glitch,” the spokesperson says. In a news release late Friday, Moneris said that when it became aware of the problem it immediately started a diagnostic and restoration process and concurrently set in motion a process to move to its back-up system. The restoration process was successful and the back-up system conversion was not implemented. During the outage, calls flooded into Moneris's customer-service center, creating a backlog that caused some merchants to receive a busy signal. Besides Visa and MasterCard credit card sales, the glitch affected Interac PIN-based point-of-sale transactions and American Express Co. transactions in Canada, the spokesperson says. The problem did not affect Moneris's U.S. affiliate, Moneris Solutions Inc., which is based in suburban Chicago. The spokesperson says that until Friday's incident, Moneris's system had operated virtually flawlessly for years. Network uptime exceeds 99.9%, according to the release. “It was a minor headache, and certainly frustrating for the merchants and customers,” he says. Moneris is a joint venture of RBC Financial Group and BMO Financial Group, parent companies of the Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal, respectively. It processes more than 2.3 billion transactions annually.