Update: MediaNama spoke to Manish Patel, CEO of POS machine company Mswipe who spoke told us that card networks are unable to deal with the sudden surge in payments on their networks. He added that on Saturday between 7 pm to 9.30, pm Visa's servers failed but POS machines were still able to process payments from MasterCard. MediaNama was unable to independently verify this but we have written to Visa and will update once we hear from them. Meanwhile, Mswipe said that it saw a huge surge in the number of transactions it processed. Typically, Mswipe processes 45,000-50,000 transactions a day. On Friday, this number went up to 1 lakh transactions and to 1.25 lakh transaction on Saturday. On Sunday, Patel added the number of transactions went above their capacity to process them and that they are currently adding more capacity. Earlier: POS terminals across the country suffered outages for several hours over the weekend and many card transactions were declined according to multiple people who spoke with MediaNama. For example, card transactions at a restaurant in Mumbai's Mulund West was down from 7 pm to 10 pm on Friday, and there was a similar outage the next day. The restaurant owner told MediaNama that he had contacted ICICI Bank about the outages, and they attributed it to the demonetization drive, saying they needed some more time to recalibrate. Many stores in the neighbourhood also could not process card payments, and insisted that customers pay by cash. MediaNama's Salman SH and Sneha Johari…
