Late May Bank Holiday

Our sales office will be closed on Monday 31st May, however all on-line orders will be procesed as usual. In stock items will be dispatched on Tuesday.

Our office will be closed on Monday 3rd May. However on-line order recieved over the weekend will continue to be processed, and in-stock items will be despatched on Tuesday 4th.

The problems with the card processing system are now resolved.

Further to our announcement yesterday. BT have not yet been able to resolve all of the issues caused by the fire at their BT Exchange in Paddington yesterday.  As such we wanted to update you on what’s happening.

The work-around solution is still in place and SagePay are doing everything they can to stabilise processing.  However, it is likely that some transactions may be slower than normal. 

Technical Update

At 9:50am 31st March Sage Pay experienced an interruption in X25 connectivity which is used to send authorisations to their banking partners.  The issue was non system related and British Telecom has confirmed the cause was a fire at their Exchange in the Paddington area of London.

Switching over to their Disaster Recovery Centre restored processing with all banks apart from Lloyds TSB and HBOS.

Conversations with Lloyds TSB Cardnet and FirstData, the entities responsible for processing transactions for Lloyds TSB, confirmed that all of FirstData’s X25 connectivity related to processing transactions for HBOS and Lloyds TSB had been affected by the BT Exchange outage at Paddington.

At around 3:15pm on the 31st FirstData called Sage Pay with alternative X25 addresses and processing resumed.

The BT Exchange problem affected large areas of the country, and many different types of connections including X25, the subsequent automatic rerouting of these traffic types is still causing congestion across the unaffected network infrastructure due to the volume of traffic.

Our office will be closed on Friday 2nd and Monday 5th April, however warehouse staff will still be working to process your orders. Where stock is available, your order will be dispatched on Tuesday 6th April, the next available posting day.

Have a happy easter.

There has been a large fire at a telephone exchange near Paddington in London. This exchange is used by many major banks to route their card processing transactions. SagePay our payment provider also uses the same exchange. SagePay have been able to route there systems elsewhere, however some of the banks have not yet been able to do so. Therefore there may be problems processing card payments.

If you have problems, please either use PayPal, if you have an account or call our sales line on 0800 085 44 95 durung office hours.

Due to heavy snow the main A9 road is blocked, consequently, no mail or deliveries have got through to us overnight. If your order is showing a status of “New stock due soon”. There may be an extra day’s delay in us dispatching your order.

Please accept our apologies.