Visa is working to fix a wide-spread technical glitch covering all European countries that is preventing card payments from being processed on its platform.
Danish payments body Payment Business Services (PBS) is one of the firms affected and says it has been experiencing problems with Visa transactions since 4:49am this morning. Since 11:53am all Visa transactions have been rejected.
PBS says all European countries are affected.
Visa spokesperson Simon Kleine told Finextra that the glitch did not affect all transactions and only "some" have been declined.
"We are currently experiencing some technical problems in our card transaction processing. In some cases this is resulting in card transactions being declined. Immediate action is being taken to overcome this problem and we hope to have a full service resumed as soon as possible," says Kleine in a statement.
Kleine says an interim backup system has been in place since mid-day which has processed most transactions, but not all. He says Visa is working on putting a more substantial backup in place that is able to process all transactions.
Kleine told Finextra that Visa's data indicates the interim backup has been "highly effective" in the UK and that there haven't been any major issues in France and Italy.
But he says Nordic countries and central Europe have been the most affected.
Update
Following the implementation of a backup system on Friday afternoon, Visa says a full service was resumed and all transactions are now being processed normally.