Normally event attendees have no idea of what goes on in the background of a stadium’s payment-processing business, but when systems go down like they did Saturday night, it’s not a pleasant outcome for anyone involved.
Details are still being sorted out but apparently a system outage at a company called TSYS, which calls itself “a leading global provider of seamless, secure and innovative solutions to payment card issuers,” caused concessions systems to become inoperable at some U.S. venues Saturday night, including the San Diego Padres’ Petco Park and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.
Shift4 Payments, which processes payments at many businesses in Las Vegas, including for the Las Vegas Raiders at Allegiant Stadium, also tweeted that they were aware of the problem, which they said was with TSYS and not with Shift4’s systems. Allegiant Stadium was hosting the WWE SummerSlam wrestling show Saturday night, and according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal the cashless concessions systems were not operable, causing large lines to form and that some concessions stands were just handing out prepared food and non-alcoholic beverages.
Petco Park was hosting a game Saturday night between the Padres and the Philadelphia Phillies. Some Twitter reports from the stadium also said that food and drinks were just being handed out for free during the outage. At both stadiums the outages caused even greater problems than usual because of the shift to cashless payments that most venues have made during the Covid-19 pandemic. A tweet from Petco Park said its stands were accepting cash or giving food and drink away.
According to tweets from Shift4, the TSYS system was restored later Saturday evening, and according to eyewitness reports from Allegiant Stadium, the concessions stands were able to process payments later in the evening. More as we hear more about the outage.
UPDATE, 8/23/21: Though nobody from Shift4 Payments was made available for an interview, the company did release a statement regarding the outage: “TSYS, a third-party vendor owned by Global Payments, experienced a complete outage Saturday evening impacting hundreds of thousands of businesses nationwide. Since TSYS makes up a large portion of the US payments infrastructure, this outage impacted many other payment processors and financial institutions across the country and unfortunately this included a limited number of our venue partners. While Shift4 Payments did not cause the outage, we are fully compensating all of our impacted customers for any losses suffered during TSYS’s backend failure. We will always prioritize doing what’s right for our partners, first and foremost.“
