Kenishirotie - stock.adobe.com
Visa card payments system goes down across the UK and Ireland
Millions of businesses across the UK and Ireland are unable to accept VIsa card payments because of a "service disruption"
Millions of shops and businesses across the UK are unable to process Visa card payments due to a nationwide outage in the Visa network. The credit card payment firm confirmed the service disruption in a statement, and said it is in the throes of establishing its cause.
“This incident is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe being processed,” the statement said. “We are investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation."
SME-focused merchant and card services provider Paymentsense released a statement on the social networking site Twitter, confirming the outage is affecting all payment providers who rely on the Visa system across the UK and Ireland.
“We are in touch with Visa to help provide a fix to this, and we’ll issue an update via our social channels and email as soon as we have one,” the statement said.
According to social media reports, the disruption is preventing users from making contactless, mobile and Chip and PIN-based payments in stores and online, while ATM withdrawals are thought to be unaffected.
The problems are understood to have begun around 2.30pm on Friday 1 June 2018. Some initial reports suggested other payment providers could be affected, including Mastercard, but that appears not to be the case.
Read more about Visa
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