From the pump, the authorization request snakes through a likely hop or two to get to the acquiring processor, the tech company that interfaces with Visa for the merchant bank, which is the bank that collects the gas station’s money.

From there, the request is sent to Visa, where they route it to the issuing processor, the tech company that interfaces with Visa for your card’s bank. This is who verifies the authorization against your available balance and who checks for fraud most commonly.

If your bank doesn’t know about the transaction it is because it never got to them.

Sounds like this was an issue on the gas company side. Probably a service offline and it choked. They can get in a ton of trouble for this with the payment network btw, if it happens a lot, cause they are hosing the ecosystem.