Elavon’s Interac payment service experienced an outage in Canada on April 29, taking down debit functions on Canada’s major payment terminals, including Godaddy Poynt, and causing businesses to turn away customers who pay with debit cards.
At the time of writing, the outage has been ongoing for approximately six hours. Elavon first posted the outage on its status page at around 12 p.m. EST and identified the issue three hours later, but did not release the cause. It anticipated that it would have the issues resolved by 6:30 p.m.
“Technical teams continue to work towards a resolution for this issue. At this time Canadian Debit transactions are unavailable. Customers are asked to run all transactions as Credit. We anticipate this being resolved by 6:30 PM ET on 29-April. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” wrote the company on its website.
The outage has caused long wait times at Elavon’s support centres.
@elavon I don't understand how you think it's appropriate that we have to wait on hold for 2 hours, only for that call to be dropped, when our debit terminal is down. You're losing money with each transaction that has to be cash. #businessfail #elavonfail #customersatisfaction
— Walking Fish (@WalkingFish3) April 29, 2022
The issue was confirmed by a Poynt support representative.
It’s unclear if the outage is caused by a security breach.
Visa and Mastercard transactions are not affected.
According to Elavon’s web page, it handles $300 billion worth of commerce and services 1.3 million customers.
IT World Canada has reached out to Elavon and Poynt for comments and will update the story once it receives a reply.
Update April 29, 6:41 EST: Elavon marked the issue as resolved at 6:15 p.m EST.