CARD giant Visa has crashed sparking payment chaos across Europe with millions of Brits affected.
The problems come as Brits prepare to knock-off for the weekend just one day after pay day.The card network operates card payments the majority of banks in the UK as well millions of businesses.
There are fears the outage could cause long queues at cash points as Brits try to access their money.
Epsom racecourse has been forced to close its bars during ladies day as its tills are currently not working due to the IT glitch.
Supermarkets, restaurants, and bars across the UK are unable to process payments.
Customers are being advised to take cash with them.
Click clack king today #retro #Visa #retailproblems pic.twitter.com/J3dhm8DpsZ
— Darren Monks (@Retailathlete) June 1, 2018
Staff at Morrisons showed old-school imprint and signature machines, as reports suggest they are being forced to go back to the retro technology to take payments.
The Visa website, proudly states: ” No other card is more widely accepted around the world than Visa debit.”
“As millions of people around the world have found, you can easily use Visa debit everyday, everywhere, for everything.”
A spokesperson from Visa said: “Visa is currently experiencing a service disruption.
“This incident is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed.
“We are investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation.”
High street banks Santander, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Bank and NatWest have been tweeting customers affected by the outage to inform them that they will try and resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Banks are advising customers that the problems are “intermittent” and that it is “slowly recovering”.
Last year, the credit card company suffered a three-day outage in its “settlement” system.
The unprecedented crash didn’t affect customers but meant that thousands payments couldn’t be processed.
Urgent: VISA outage announcement affecting all merchants nationwide. pic.twitter.com/BMuRLIs5cY
— Paymentsense (@Paymentsense) June 1, 2018
Paymentsense, which runs card payments for small businesses, issued a statement on Twitter saying that a Visa outage was affecting shops across the country.
It said: “There is currently a disruption of service in taking payments from Visa.
“It is affecting all providers across the UK and Ireland.
“We are in touch with Visa to help provide a fix to this, and we’ll issue and update via our social channels and email as soon we have one”.
