Millions Impacted By Worldpay Outage

Some online gamblers and eCommerce website operators are up in arms after being blocked from receiving daily payments because of an outage at Worldpay, the United Kingdom payment processor. Worldpay’s customers include British Airways.

According to a report, the outage has been going on for three weeks, angering some companies who have been contending with upset customers. The outage could harm its reputation as the newly public company aims to grow. The disruption is impacting online gambling with Stan James, the online sports betting site turning to Twitter to apologize for the inconvenience caused by Worldpay having “withdrawal delays.” The outage at Worldpay is also impacting Etsy in the U.S., according to the report who has seen its stock price plummet more than 3.5 percent over the last two weeks.

Worldpay blamed the outage on an isolated issue with one of its gateways, saying it’s only impacting a small amount of its customers — about 1 percent — and a tiny amount of the transactions the company processes every day. Little consolation, however, to those who remain effected now three weeks later.

The problem is reportedly stems from an overload of error messages on one of its servers that processes payments. It was caused by new software and system changes that were introduced into the network. Worldpay has reported the outage to the Financial Conduct Authority and said it is working to fix it as soon as possible. The National Lottery is working with Worldpay and said on Twitter it expects the issue to be resolved soon.

In March, Worldpay said that after its initial public offering last year its underlying transaction growth came in at 14 percent to more than 13 billion. What’s more, earnings in the roughly five months since its IPO increased 8 percent to slightly higher than $578 million.  Worldpay was spun out of Royal Bank of Scotland in 2010 and then was subsequently bought (for £2 billion) by private equity investors Advent International and Bain Capital, which are still Worldpay’s biggest shareholders.