Credit card outage hits convenience stores, other merchants across Ja…

Visa's network suffered a multi-hour outage in Japan on 16 July, blocking card payments at convenience stores and other merchants, and disrupting credit card functions in transit apps like Mobile Suica and Mobile Pasmo. Major issuers Mitsubishi UFJ Nicos and Sumitomo Mitsui Card were affected. If you're building payments infrastructure in Japan, you just watched Visa take down retail and transit for hours—and card issuers had no fallback. Build redundancy into your rail payments or expect to lose transactions when the network blinks.