© Alamy
Even shoppers not using Visa have been unable to make purchases, because the network provides payment systems for a range of shops and financial institutions.
Customers have reported arriving at tills to have their cards declined. Retailers say they have been left unable to take payments in shops, bars and other outlets, forcing them to resort to only taking cash or not making sales at all.
The payments look to customers like they are being declined, in the same way as when a card has insufficient funds. But the issues are actually a consequence of the global network of payments run by Visa.
Visa users received messages telling them there is a "disruption of service", meaning payment providers are unable to receive or send money.
A range of different banks and other financial institutions use Visa's payment system, meaning that even transactions using non-Visa branded cards could be affected by the problem.
The issues have been described as intermittent, and some payments over the Visa network do still appear to be going through. Cash withdrawals do appear to be functioning.
A statement from Visa suggested that it didn't yet know the cause of the outage.
"Visa is currently experiencing a service disruption," it read.
"This incident 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."
It was the start of a totalitarian nightmare. among other social issues. Do I think this is the same scenario, hard to tell really, maybe a glitch in the program.
But I think it demonstrates how dependent and vulnerable we are as a peoples, paying for goods and services by internet transfers,
I have a niece in the UK who is now in her fifties, she has always paid in cash, since she was a teenager, not only for minor purchases. In fact her maiden name was Cash, she has relatively little to do with the internet, then again she is married and her husband does all that stuff with the internet.
Makes me wonder who of the two, if it came to the crunch, is the most proficient in handling finances or money for that matter.