First Data Corporation, the processor for 65% of transactions processed in the US is experiencing a system wide outage, affecting millions of merchants around the U.S., sources tell TLS. Merchants are getting errors and are unable to process any cards or batch their terminals at this time.

Banquest Payment Systems, a Lakewood-based processing company is one of many credit card processing companies whose clients have been affected.

“We immediately notified our merchants and are staying in touch with the technical teams working to resolve this issue,” says Banquest President Kevin Frisch. “You can imagine an outage of this magnitude is getting an extreme level of attention and systems should be back up very quickly.”

UPDATE: The system has been restored.

[TLS]