April 2010

Hello,

As you may have heard, BT have not yet been able to resolve all of the issues caused by the fire at their BT Exchange in Paddington yesterday.  As such we wanted to update you on what's happening at Sage Pay.

Our work-around solution is still in place and we're doing everything we can to stabilise processing.  However, it is likely that some transactions may be slower than normal.  If you'd like exactly what happened yesterday, you can find full details below.

We will continue to update the system monitor page but of course if you'd like to speak to someone, our team is available 24/7 on 0845 111 44 55.

Kind regards,

Colin Mould
Head of Customer Services

Technical Update

At 9:50am 31st March Sage Pay experienced an interruption in X25 connectivity which is used to send authorisations to our banking partners.  The issue was non system related and British Telecom has confirmed the cause was a fire at their Exchange in the Paddington area of London.

Switching over to our Disaster Recovery Centre restored processing with all banks apart from Lloyds TSB and HBOS.

Conversations with Lloyds TSB Cardnet and FirstData, the entities responsible for processing transactions for Lloyds TSB, confirmed that all of FirstData’s X25 connectivity related to processing transactions for HBOS and Lloyds TSB had been affected by the BT Exchange outage at Paddington.

At around 3:15pm on the 31st FirstData called Sage Pay with alternative X25 addresses and processing resumed.

The BT Exchange problem affected large areas of the country, and many different types of connections including X25, the subsequent automatic rerouting of these traffic types is still causing congestion across the unaffected network infrastructure due to the volume of traffic.