NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — During a recent investor conference call, Ticketmaster's Barry Diller floated a reason for the recent technical snafu that led to a fan outrage and class action lawsuit over a recent Bruce Springsteen ticketing flap.
The controversy was sparked when Springsteen's tickets went on sale. Ticketmaster's website suffered delays and some fans ended up being informed that while tickets had sold out rapidly, that they were already available for purchase at much higher prices on Ticketmaster's secondary market site, Ticketsnow.
According to Diller, this was caused largely by a "glitch" in Visa's credit card processing, and has been misrepresented by the press. Unsurprisingly, Visa has taken rather strident exception to Diller's characterization of the incident.
"We were surprised by the comments of Ticketmaster CEO Barry Diller regarding their recent ticket issues. Ticketmaster's characterization that an earlier technical 'glitch' impacting its online ticket sales was related to Visa’s systems is inaccurate. Visa's processing network was fully functional on February 2 with no authorization issues. In fact, VisaNet has run with nearly 100 percent reliability for the past decade." said Visa spokesman Joe Carberry in a statement issued by the company.
"VisaNet is the world’s largest retail payment network, securely and reliably facilitating the transfer of value and information every minute of every day of the year. We operate four processing centers on three continents that are fully synchronized and operate identical authorization platforms. This enables Visa to reroute transaction volume from one data center to another as needed. Our multiple and redundant systems help ensure that VisaNet can continuously meet the processing demands of all our customers worldwide."
