LONDON: Payment systems giant Visa said it was experiencing problems processing transactions in Europe today and was trying to fix the issue.

“We are currently experiencing a service disruption which is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed,” a Visa spokesman told the Media.

“We are investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation.” Visa users have taken to social media to complain.

It is understood the Bank of England is aware of the issue and is in touch with Visa. HSBC bank’s UK Twitter account replied to a customer query saying: “From what we understand there are still intermittent issues but services are slowly recovering.”

Paymentsense, which provides card machines, online payment gateways, and virtual terminals to some 60,000 independent businesses in Britain and Ireland, advised users to try paying via contactless transactions.

“We have been informed that Visa has corrected the outage and transactions are now starting to go through. There is still some intermittency however, we believe this is due to a backlog of transactions,” it said.

“We now understand that contactless transactions have a better chance of going through. We’d encourage affected customers to try contactless transactions where possible.”