Visa investigates "service disruption" across Europe
LONDON -- Visa says it is experiencing a "service disruption" as users in several European countries report that they are unable to make payments with their cards. The credit card firm said it is investigating the cause of the incident, which "is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed."
Visa says it is "working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation."
The extent of the disruption was not immediately clear, BBC News reports, but customers in the United Kingdom, Ireland and other European countries have reported being unable to use their Visa cards Friday.
Mastercard said it was not seeing problems on its network, and the Payment Systems Regulator said it understood the problem was limited to Visa card payments only, the BBC reports.
The bank HSBC said the "industry-wide issue" was affecting Visa payments, though ATM machines were still working. It later said on Twitter that "there are still intermittent issues but services are slowly recovering."
Payment processing company Paymentsense said late Friday afternoon that transactions were starting to go through after a period of disruption but "there is still some intermittency" because of a backlog.
