UK payment processing firm Worldpay is experiencing ongoing problems issuing payments despite promising to work with clients to resolve the software issue.
Worldpay, which processes more than 36m daily payments and counts British Airways and the National Lottery among its clients, has suffered a technical glitch for more than three weeks resulting in the blocking of several millions of payments. And the issue has still not been fully fixed.
The company has attempted to play down the problem, saying that only a small minority of customers, less than 1%, have been affected. "Worldpay is aware of an isolated issue impacting one of our gateways, resulting in a delay to settlement for a small number of our customers," said the company in a statement issued on its website earlier this month. "We are working to resolve this issue urgently and we have proactively communicated with all affected customers."
However the statement has failed to pacify an increasingly irate set of e-commerce users, particularly those that have suffered further problems. Customers of vintage fashion e-commerce site Etsy have now been hit with duplicate charges as a result of Worldpay's efforts to fix an earlier problem with payments.
Meanwhile online gambling site Stan James has been unable to issue winnings to customers, while the National Lottery has stated on Twitter that it is working closely with Worldpay to fix the problem after a customer complained about waiting more than eight days for a refund of more than £1,000.
The Financial Times has reported that the error was caused by an overload of error messages on one of Worldpay's servers caused by a recent software update. The server was consequently taken offline and the outstanding payments were reconciled manually until the server is back up and running.
The glitch will no doubt be an embarassment to the company given that it recently spent £400m on a new platform to handle more than 325 international payment methods.But the company, which was previously owned by Royal Bank of Scotland and then bought by US private equity groups and then floated in 2015 in one of the largest IPOs for a UK fintech, has seen its share price remain largely unaffected by the issue.
According to online news site TechCrunch, Worldpay's share price has risen by 3% over the last five trading days. Meanwhile Etsy, one of the affected e-commerce sites, has seen its share price fall by almost 3.5% for the same period.