Visa issues: Systems at 'close to normal levels' after payment network goes down across UK and Europe

Visa has said its systems are now operating at "close to normal levels" after a major outage affected users across Europe.

The company said the earlier disruption was "the result of a hardware failure".

Customers across the UK had reported having their cards declined earlier on Friday, leaving them unable to make purchases.

Retailers said they had been unable to take payments in shops, bars and other establishments forcing them to offer cash-only sales.

“Our goal is to ensure all Visa cards work reliably 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” the company said in a statement.

“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 users had received messages explaining there was a “disruption of service”, meaning they would be unable to receive or send money.

A range of different banks and other financial institutions use Visa's payment system, meaning that even some transactions using non-Visa branded cards were be affected by the problem.

The issues were described as intermittent, and some payments over the Visa were able to be processed during the problems.