Visa Card Payments Failing in UK, Europe, Highlighting Need for Decentralized Options

Visa has said that their card payments are experiencing disruptions across Britain and Europe, the BBC reports today, June 1.

Visa, which handles over 150 mln transactions a day, tweeted about the service disruption, noting that they will keep updating as they resolve the situation:

We are currently experiencing a service disruption which 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. We will keep you updated.

— Visa UK (@VisaUK) June 1, 2018

In comparison, the Bitcoin’s (BTC) decentralized network has been functional 99.99 percent of the time since its inception on Jan. 3, 2009.

According to the Payment Systems Regulator, the problem is isolated to solely Visa card payments.

Barclays and the Bank of Ireland have told their customers to withdraw cash using ATMs.

We are aware some customers are experiencing Visa debit card issues. This is impacting multiple banks across Europe. We will update when we know more. Cash withdrawals can be made at any BOI ATM.

— Bank of Ireland (@talktoBOI) June 1, 2018

Other banks including NatWest and HSBC tweeted about Visa problem, noting that Mastercard transactions are not affected:

We are aware that some customers are experiencing issues with Visa Card Payments. This is an industry wide issue which is being investigated as a matter of urgency and we apologise for any inconvenience. ATM and MasterCard transactions are not impacted.

— NatWest (@NatWest_Help) June 1, 2018

We are aware of an industry wide issue affecting Visa payments which is under investigation. ATM and MasterCard transactions are not impacted. Visa are working hard to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We will continue to support our impacted customers as needed.

— HSBC UK (@HSBC_UK) June 1, 2018

According to the BBC, the supermarket chain Tesco has said that the Visa problem is affecting customers using contactless payment, but not those using chip and pin payment systems. Sainsbury’s has also noted it was seeing problems with Visa card payments.

However, card payment solution Paymentsense tweeted that Visa has “corrected the outage” and the current interruptions are due to a “backlog of transactions:”

Dear customers, We have been informed that VISA has corrected the outage and transactions are now starting to go through. There is still some intermittency however, we believe this is due to a backlog of transactions.

— Paymentsense (@Paymentsense) June 1, 2018