As tens of thousands of fans watched the WWE SummerSlam, a nationwide payment system outage rocked the boat.
Because of that, vendors were unable to complete transactions in the cashless stadium. That led to a dearth of alcohol sales.
But there were reports of free soda and food being given to fans.
Reports had the vendors, who had been planning on the event to sell their products, not being able to sell them due to the outage. Because of the disruption, reports had the concessions workers beginning to give away food and drinks for free because of the broken expectation.
According to a vendor manager at the stadium’s Twitch Lounge, the outage came from payment processor Shift4, which runs the stadium’s point of sale systems. The company released a statement around 7:14 p.m. saying they were aware of the issues with third-party platform TSYS.
“We are aware of a nationwide processing outage at TSYS, one of the largest payment platforms in the country. This outage is impacting some of our customers & many other payments providers. We are in close contact with TSYS to facilitate a resolution as quickly as possible,” the company said, according to the report, and the company reported that the issue was resolved by around 9 p.m.
As the world moves more toward a digitally-focused economy, there will be more stories of outages that drastically affect various parts of the world. Recently a tech glitch took down dozens of U.S. and U.K.-based news and government sites, including including The New York Times and Le Monde in France. The root of that issue apparently turned out to be an outage with Fastly Inc., which operates a content-delivery site to help boost websites’ loading speeds.
Read more: Tech Glitch Shuts Down Government, News Websites In Europe And US
In addition, there was an outage at Amazon for a short period of time on June 23, which affected over 6,200 shoppers and 1,700 Prime Video customers.
See also: Amazon Website Back Online Following Brief Outage
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