Due to a recent outage, some Bank of Ireland customers were unable to use their debit cards. The bank reported that approximately one in seven customers were unable to use their Visa cards at point-of-sale (POS) terminals, according to news from Independent.ie.
In one instance, a customer had trouble paying at a gas station in Galway: His card was declined, and he called the bank in an attempt to resolve the issue. The outage also impacted customers traveling abroad who were trying to pay for expenses such as hotel bills. Beyond POS terminals, some customers were having trouble withdrawing money from automated teller machines (ATMs).
The Bank of Ireland said some customers were facing intermittent issues with ATM transactions and point-of-sale cards. Fortunately, the bank was able to get the cards working again and apologized for the outage.
The news comes as Visa customers in parts of the U.K. and Europe weren’t able to use their cards on June 1 after a service disruption prevented transactions from being processed.
“Visa had a system failure that impacted customers across Europe,” the company said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Most of Visa’s card transactions in Europe are processed outside London, so that is where the company focused its investigation and discovered the hardware failure. Visa apologized to cardholders and merchants, saying it “fell well short” of its goal of ensuring that all of its cards work reliably 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Visa is the largest network in Europe, accounting for about 66 percent of card purchase volume there as of 2016, and about 50 percent of card purchase volume in the U.K.
Earlier this year, Visa announced that Visa Checkout, the online payment method introduced in the U.K. last year, hit a milestone by securing 1 million customer accounts. The company said the U.K. is now among the fastest-growing markets for Visa Checkout.
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