Visa payment systems crashed yesterday, causing chaos in Cambridge and across the UK. However, the payment network has said it’s systems are back up and running following yesterday’s crash. It also said the crash was not a result of “unauthorised access or malicious event”. But it apologised, saying it fell “well short” of its goal to "work reliably 24 hours a day".
"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 said in a statement.
The blockage has left some customers stuck at the tills in stores across the continent.
Visa users took to social media to complain.
Paymentsense, which provides card machines, online payment gateways and virtual terminals to some 60,000 independent businesses in Britain and Ireland, advised users to try paying via contactless transactions.
“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,” it said.
“We now understand that contactless transactions have a better chance of going through. We’d encourage affected customers to try contactless transactions where possible.”
