Visa's payment system is now operating at full capacity after a hardware failure caused widespread disruption across the UK and Europe on Friday. The company issued an apology to millions of customers who were unable to make purchases or withdraw cash for several hours.
The outage began at around 2:30pm BST, leaving shoppers unable to pay for goods at major retailers. Queues formed at petrol stations and supermarket tills as transactions failed. Visa confirmed the issue was not due to a cyber-attack or unauthorised access.
Customers like Lisa Eagleton-Muir, 44, who was travelling from London to Newcastle, found their Visa cards rejected at shops and cafes. She later managed to withdraw cash from an ATM. The Bank of England contacted Visa to seek updates on the restoration of services.
A spokesman for Asda explained that the fault occurred in the communication between Visa and chip-and-pin machines, preventing authorisation messages from being returned. In Spain, the Guardia Civil reassured the public via Twitter that the issue was a service crash, not theft or hacking.
Visa Europe's statement early Saturday confirmed full capacity had been restored, allowing normal use of cards for purchases and ATM withdrawals. The company acknowledged it had fallen 'well short' of its reliability goals.
