This week, First Data announced the dates that they will begin their transition to the mandatory TLS 1.2 upgrade. They will start to decommission customers who are using outdated security protocols by implementing incremental processing blackouts. This upgrade is required to comply with PCI Security Standards (https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/migrating-from-ssl-and-early-tls).
First Data will gradually cease service incrementally beginning the month of February. Once this process begins, you will not be able to process credit card payments if you are using security protocols prior to TLS 1.2. The dates of the incremental blackouts are
- 2/20/18 at 10am to 10:30am EST
- 2/27/18 at 2pm to 2:30pm EST
- 3/6/18 at 6pm to 6:30pm EST
***Merchants who have not upgraded to TLS 1.2 will not be able to process during the 30 minute timeframes above.***
First Data is providing this processing blackouts service as a courtesy to alert customers that they will lose processing services permanently on April 15, 2018, if they haven’t upgraded to TLS 1.2. By incrementally shutting off support for older security protocols, First Data is providing a window of opportunity for users to upgrade while minimizing the impact to support call centers.
Users should verify their entire payment ecosystem is TLS 1.2 compliant to avoid the outage as First Data is the largest supplier of credit card processing services. Users may believe they do not utilize First Data services when, in fact, they may. Many banks and other organizations “white label” First Data services. These include banks such as Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and local community banks.
There are thousands of system users who also utilize First Data services such as Verifone Point, Mobi Systems, Aurus Pay, VivoNet, GK Software, Tender Retail, IQMetrix, Aptos ESDM, B2B Soft, CenPOS, Jack Rabbit, and so on. Users of these systems should upgrade to the new TLS 1.2 protocol if not completed already.
Nodus can help customers upgrade their payment system with our B2B payment products and PayFabric gateway. If you need assistance in upgrading to TLS 1.2 or have experienced an outage, please visit: https://www.nodus.com/customers/
