American Express had some outages on Friday night, November 18, 2022. About 10-15% of credit card transactions on our platform use American Express credit cards, and some of those transactions took extra time and some failed.
When we try to process a transaction that fails, our processor (Adyen) gives us a status code back. Sometimes the credit card is expired or overdrawn. In cases like this, we get either a timeout or a system failure notice back – in this case it was mostly a 30 second timeout since the AMEX servers were not responding. When that happens, we try a backup system using Adyen’s EU endpoint.
Here are the stats from 7:15 – 8:15 PM last night:
Successful transactions (non-AMEX or some AMEX that went thru): 1,330
1st Try Failures: 176
2nd Try Successes: 25
Failures: 151
The systems came back online and operations are normal again.