The great bancard network breakdown

[Bertrand Meyer <bertrand@eiffel.com>]

The following is excerpted from Le Monde dated Tuesday, 29 June 1993,
page 18. Translation and ellipses by Bertrand Meyer.

        A Black Week-End for Automatic Teller Machines

            THE GREAT BANKCARD NETWORK BREAKDOWN

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  Background (from the end of the article)

  [All bankcards issued in France, but in France only, now have
  a built-in chip.] The famous [bankcard chip] has suffered many
  infantile problems. And for several months the Anglo-Saxon press
  has criticized French merchants, who sometimes reject foreign
  bankcards under the pretext that they don't have a chip.

    [Note by BM: I have a ``foreign'' card but have not
    encountered such a problem.]
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Now for the recent incident:

  Last week-end was tough for many of the 21 million French people who
  have a bankcard. They had the unpleasant surprise of being almost
  unable to use it on Saturday the 26th and Sunday the 27th, whether
  to withdraw money from ATMs or to pay merchants. All because the
  computers in charge of authorizing payments to close to 40% of
  current cards were down for almost thirty hours. The loss to
  businesses, already hurt by the recession, is hard to evaluate; but
  the French bankcard system, touted as a little marvel of technology
  and safety, has just shown its limits.
  
  [...] The collapse was caused by a breakdown of the Sligos company's 
  computers, which manage withdrawal and payment authorizations for
  close to half of the cards.
  
  Banks such as BNP and Societe Generale, which have their own computer
  servers for bankcard processing, were not affected.
  
  [Several paragraphs describe how various businesses tried to cope
  with the problem, with examples from Air France, Eurodisney etc.]  
  
  On an average day transactions amount to five million operations
  amounting to 2 billion francs.
  
  The bankcard system has been presented as a symbol of the edge that
  French banks have acquired. What characterizes it in principle is
  both safety, thanks to the built-in chip, and flexibility,
  thanks to the ability for cardholders to withdraw money from
  17,400 ATMs and buy from 520,000 merchants. But the system
  had already shown worrying signs of fragility. Last autumn [...]
  some operations were charged twice.
  
  The history of bankcards in France goes back to the beginning
  of the seventies with the creation of the GIE [consortium]
  ``Carte Bleue'', followed in 1984 by another GIE called Carte
  Bancaire [Bank Card]. [...] In ten years of constant investments
  amounting to several billion francs, the little plastic card
  has acquired a hologram and a chip and [...] has become indispensable.
  
  It seems incredible, then, that safety and relay mechanisms, as
  present in all sensitive computer systems, were not able to prevent
  last weekend's giant breakdown. Aside from a few isolated cases
  [DETAILS PLEASE! BM] the 30-hour service interruption has not had
  any really tragic consequences; it could have if the system's
  functioning had been interrupted for a longer period. One
  may indeed wonder whether the forced-march development of electronic
  money, ``monetics'', does not put a country's economy at the mercy
  of a breakdown. Last year more than two billion operations were
  performed in France with bankcards, for a total amount of 718 billion
  francs, 475 billion for payments and 243 billion for withdrawals.