Around 5pm today, Visa had a major outage occur which seemed to affect most of Europe today. Visa did provide an update at around 10pm this evening to say everything should be back up and running again, the outage was due to a hardware failure.

5pm

Update from Visa on Twitter at 4:56pm today:

“Visa is currently experiencing a service disruption. This incident is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed.”

Visa spokesman talking to Sky News

10pm

Visa has now provided an update to say the outage was caused by a hardware failure and wasn’t the cause of any malicious attack or unauthorised access.

Earlier today, Visa had a system failure that impacted customers across Europe.

Our goal is to ensure all Visa cards work reliably 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We fell well short of this goal today and we apologise to all of our partners, and most especially, to Visa cardholders.

Visa cardholders can now use their Visa cards as we are currently operating at close to normal levels.

The issue was the result of a hardware failure. We have no reason to believe this was associated with any unauthorised access or malicious event.

Visa newsroom

Source: Visa (via Twitter) and Visa Newsroom

Image: Alamy