UPDATE: This issue has now partly been resolved and payments are starting to go through, but there is a backlog of transactions which means some payments still won’t be working.
People are being encouraged to use contactless payments are they have “a better chance of going through”.
There is currently a VISA payment outage, which is impacting all merchants across the UK.
This will mean if you need to buy anything using a VISA card your transaction may be declined.
An alert from @Paymentsense said:
“There is currently a disruption of service in taking payments from VISA. It is affecting all payment providers across the UK and Ireland.
“We are in touch with VISA to help provide a fix to this, and we’ll issue an update via our social channels and email as soon as we have one.”
Urgent: VISA outage announcement affecting all merchants nationwide. pic.twitter.com/BMuRLIs5cY
— Paymentsense (@Paymentsense) June 1, 2018
Paymentsense is a “merchant service provider” and deliver payment services and card machines to 60,000 small businesses.
VISA has also released a statement on Twitter saying:
“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.”
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.
— VisaNewsEurope (@VisaNewsEurope) June 1, 2018
I know this will be a real nightmare for some people as Friday evening is the night a lot of people do their food shop! (I remember a time when Friday nights were so different!!)
Members of the Reduce Your Supermarket Spend community have spoken about transactions being declined in high street stores across the UK, as well as ATMs not working, with many stores accepting cash only.
Sharma told us:
“The whole of Colchester is affected and there was a huge queue for the cash machine.”
Jade told us:
“I tried to pay by card in New Look and Superdrug and my card was declined several times!”
Claire just got back from her local Morrisons. She told u:
“All card machines went down. It was utter chaos as I left”
UPDATE: This issue has now partly been resolved and payments are starting to go through, but there is 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
Read next: 7 Reasons Why Your Debit Card Got Declined
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