Visa recovers from transaction outage
Payment systems company 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, while others were forced to queue at ATMs.
“Visa has resolved a technical issue which occurred yesterday in Europe and prevented some consumers from using Visa for payments,” the firm said in a statement 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 issue was a result of a hardware failure and “is not associated with any unauthorised access or cyberattack”, it said. CEO 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 said that it was not possible to say how many users across Europe had been affected.
A 2017 report by the UK Cards Association said that Visa debit cards accounted for 97% of all debit cards, meaning the disruption was likely to have had a large impact.
On Saturday, the Daily Telegraph reported that more than £1 in every £3 in the UK was spent on a Visa card, using a system designed to process 65,000 transactions a second.
Visa users took to social media to complain, and banks tried to explain the situation to their customers on Friday.
Paymentsense, which provides card machines, online payment gateways and virtual terminals to 60,000 independent businesses in Britain and Ireland, advised users to try paying via contactless transactions.
After the hardware issue was resolved, Paymentsense said customers continued to experience “intermittency” because of a backlog in transactions.
In London, the St James of Bermondsey pub was almost empty on what should have been a busy Friday night, with a “cash only” sign on the bar seemingly deterring customers.
Sandra Foy, who owns a bookshop in Manchester, told Sky News: “I run a small business and the loss of any business is a big deal for us.”