On Thursday June 13th around 7pm, dozens of users started complaining on Social Networks saying that they contactless cards got declined, and that their banks denied any responsibility. TFL Acknowledged its responsibility in its replies to these users, but never gave any explanation on what happened, what had been done to fix, and the reassurance on this not happening again. In any serious event like this one, a "Post Mortem" document is written. Can this "Post Mortem" document be communicated?

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Our ref: FOI-0799-1920/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 18 June 2019 asking for information about Contactless.

Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.

The Major Incident review process for this incident has not yet been concluded, and therefore we currently do not hold the "Post Mortem" document requested. 

However, we can provide the following information on what happened and what was done to fix the problem:

In the early morning of Thursday 13^th June the TfL overnight contactless card settlement file process partially failed.

This event was immediately managed as a Major Incident and required technical parties including TfL’s Merchant Acquirer were consulted on how best to recover from this.   

The advice was to seek reauthorisation for all cards via our Merchant Acquirer prior to attempting to resubmit the settlement file.

This process was implemented on Thursday afternoon and was mostly successful, however an unanticipated consequence occurred whereby around 250,000 of the reauthorisations for mobile devices were declined, even though customer’s accounts were in good order.  When TfL receive a declined authorisation we are obliged to stop accepting that card or mobile device, and the system started to implement that rule.  As soon as we noticed this was occurring, we took action to stop it, unfortunately circa 80,000 contactless cards on mobile devices had been processed by that point, so could not be used for travel.

The process of re-instating the 80,000 cards for travel was started early on Friday morning, but was technically complicated and ran into the weekend before all were able to travel again.

Staff were instructed to advise affected customers to use a different card / device to make their journey, and to contact TfL Customer Services if they were affected financially (for example they might have been eligible for a weekly cap if they had been able to continue using their phone as normal).

The Major Incident Review will include an investigation with the payments industry into why TfL received so many declined authorisations, and recommendations on the steps necessary to stop this re-occurring.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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