Not convinced the sky is falling just yet.
We have one DP from a poster that says his WM's were hardcoded. However I had a Meta a month ago that would not work (tried 4-5 times total - different CSRs and WMs), but was no problem at a grocery store. This could be the same deal.
Apart from that, we have DP's about the memo from Corp. We have seen that many times before and it may well be real, but that is very different to hardcode fixes. Perhaps there is a multi-swipe crackdown via memo, but that ship has long sailed in my area so not bothered. I can live with single swipe for what I need to do.
It was BAU for me today for MO and prepaid loads, including the double beep which first appeared last week.
I have 5 USB VGCs that would not swipe (ex: the terminal would indicate the amount due, but when I would swipe, it would not register the swipe), but I have this feeling that it may have been a bad batch of cards, as the USB CSRs were aware of an issue.
I then used a Meta and it worked perfectly, so just be aware that both the cupcake and black VGCs are having issues, which is probably most of my local supermarkets are either running low or are completely out of the VGC.