Please provide any and all recorded information concerning the contactless/mobile contactless payment system used by TfL and the issues experienced by it on 13 and 14 June 2019. This request is not limited to information recorded, or dated, on either of these dates, but should include recorded information of any date which concerns the issues experienced on 13 and 14 June 2019.

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Our ref: FOI-1208-1920/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 24 July 2019 asking for information about the issues experienced with the contactless/mobile contactless payment system on 13 and 14 June 2019.

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

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

You have asked for ‘any and all recorded information concerning the contactless/mobile contactless payment system used by TfL and the issues experienced by it on 13 and 14 June 2019’.

Many people from a variety of departments within TfL and companies external to TfL were involved in the investigation and recovery of this incident, and to answer your request we would need to search for all relevant emails and records. Your request could also be interpreted to include all customer transactions affected on these days and all Payment System Status messages. The Contact Centre also had many customers calling and contacting them online regarding this incident, all of which were recorded and therefore covered by your request. Searching for ‘any and all’ records would therefore exceed the ‘appropriate limit’

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you. Requests for ‘any and all’ information are likely to be refused.

We can however, provide you with the following explanation of this incident which I hope you will find useful:

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 TfL 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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