A system failure has plunged Europe into turmoil, as millions across the continent couldn’t use their Visa credit and debit cards for several hours on June first from 2.30 PM. The chip and pin transactions were reportedly blocked as Visa couldn’t proceed a confirmation message. Cardholders could neither get cash at ATMs nor pay with a Visa. This caused confusion and turmoil as people reportedly had to wait in lines in shops, petrol stations and railway stations, while their staff had no clue about the reason for rejected payments. The company fixed the blackout by the late evening; however, there were still delays due to an overflow of payments the company had to confirm.
Visa has apologized for the failure that caused mass inconvenience to its customers, both shoppers and partners.
According to the company’s statement, “The issue was the result of a hardware failure. We have no reason to believe this was associated with any unauthorized access or malicious event.”
The outage has angered and discouraged cardholders, who brought their feelings on social media. The end of the world was eventually brought up.
A bunch of Tweets were calls to spare the salesmen from both anger and bad jokes.
Some complained about being charged sometime after they already paid in cash.
Others were humorous about the mishap.
Others used the outage as an opportunity to promote Bitcoin.
There were those who didn’t believe Visa’s “system failure” explanation.