Visa card authorization network in Europe crashed today

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Never rely solely on your credit card – particularly when travelling. Your card(s) can be stolen, or subject to internet fraud and cut-off while you are on vacation or a business trip, or there may be systems failures preventing you from making payment.

You could be stuck in a medical emergency with no ability to pay the cost of treatment – or at a hotel checkout and your card is authorization is declined due to a system screwup in some outsourced dumboland where payment card transactions are processed. Been stuck in that position myself more than once with a perfectly valid, well within limit card.

The Visa credit card system serving Europe crashed today, leaving zillions of European Visa cardholders with declined transactions at checkouts all over the world.

High time the Eurozone had its own global payment card system for debit and credit cards, which doesn’t rely on foreign infrastructure based outside the Eurocurrency zone.

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Random

I was wondering what that automated message on the AIB Credit Card line was about.

Bit of a disaster if you ask me - surely they'd have some kind of redundancy on such a system!