On Thursday 1st December 2022, an issue caused by our third party payment gateway provider, Windcave, meant that all credit card payments attempted between approximately 5am to 6:30pm were only half completed. These payments appeared in onCourse as either failed with a matching ‘reverse’ payment, or with a single ‘in transaction’ status.
Credit Card transactions performed through onCourse, either via website or your onCourse system, all use this third party payment gateway. All payment transactions are done in two parts; an ‘auth’ transaction to authorise the removal of funds from the customer, and a ‘comp’ transaction to complete the transaction and move the payment from a pending state into a complete state. It’s once this is performed that the money moves to your bank account.
In the cases we’ve seen occur on Thursday, affected customers saw their ‘auth’ transactions successfully performed, but no ‘comp’ transactions to complete the process.
We’re told the issue occurred as the payment gateway began rejecting a field that we pass from our checkout, but no updates have been made to our checkout for quite some time, so it was identified as an issue by Windcave and fixed later that same day.
Credit card payments are again working as expected. There have been no issues since around 6:30pm Thursday 1st December.
For the affected payments, while we can see a number of them are already showing as ‘declined’ for some customers, there are many more that are still showing as pending for customers. We are working with the payment gateway provider to try and void these transactions. If this can’t be done, the worst case scenario is any pending money will be restored anywhere between 3-14 days from the time the payment was made.
In onCourse, you may see most of these payments will show as a ‘Failed’ status, and also have a matching ‘reverse’ transaction. This is expected. If in any cases you have ‘In transaction’ status payments, please let us know and we can have our team set them correctly to Failed.
In these cases, invoices may still have owing amounts. Check the associated enrolments. If they are still active you can either cancel them and clear the assocaited invoices with credit notes, or ask for payment again.