Visa outage causes chaos across Europe

London: Payment systems giant Visa recovered on Saturday from a hardware issue that had left it struggling to process transactions at bars, shops and cash machines across Europe.

The blockage left some customers stuck at the tills in stores across the continent late on Friday, whilst others were forced to queue at automated teller machines (ATMs).

"Visa has resolved a technical issue which occurred on Friday in Europe and prevented some consumers from using Visa for payments," the firm said in a statement at 04:32am (local time), more than 12 hours after it first reported issues."Visa Europe's payment system is now operating at full capacity, and Visa account holders can now use Visa for any of their purchases and at ATMs, as they normally would." The firm said the issue was a result of a hardware failure and "is not associated with any unauthorised access or cyberattack", whilst chief executive Al Kelly apologised to customers and businesses "for any inconvenience". "Our goal is to ensure all Visa payments work reliably 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We fell well short of this goal today," he admitted. A Visa spokesman told AFP on Friday evening - as the problems unfolded -- that it was not possible to say how many users across Europe had been affected. However, a 2017 report by the UK Cards Association reported that Visa debit cards account for 97 percent of all debit cards, meaning the disruption is likely to have had a large financial impact.

Today, the Daily Telegraph also reported that more than 1 in every 3 in the UK is spent on a Visa card, using a system designed to process up to 65,000 transactions per second.