Massive Visa Outage Affects Millions, Cue for Bitcoin as Payment Option

The biggest and most popular payment system, Visa yesterday had a huge outage in Europe that affected millions of customers as they were unable to make payments. While in contrast, public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum have never experienced operation network shutdown. This Visa outage might just be the incident that will put great focus on bitcoin as payment option.

Visa outage in Europe affects millions, the technical issue now resolved

Yesterday, the popular card payment system Visa experienced a huge outage all across the UK and Europe. This crash left millions of its customers in a lurch as they were unable to use their cards.  

The world’s biggest payment card processor had both the regions in chaos. People were unable to pay for food, trains tickets and about everything. Businesses were also affected as this network processes transactions for thousands of small as well as large businesses along with several banks.   

Visa tweeted:

“We are currently experiencing a service disruption which 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. We will keep you updated.”

This all started at around 3 PM London time when payments started to fail. This induced the shops, bars, and other service providers to go with cash only checkouts or not make sales at all.

A few hours later, the company tried to control the situation as it specified:

“Our goal is to ensure all Visa cards work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Due to a systems failure, we fell well short of this today. We apologise to all our partners & especially to Visa cardholders. We’re currently operating at close to normal levels.”  

A few hours back, the company confirmed:

“We have resolved a technical issue that impacted some consumers across Europe. Visa account holders can now use Visa for any of their purchases and at ATMs. We apologise to all our partners & especially to Visa cardholders who were affected.”

Also, read: First Trust Global Portfolio Introduces The First Blockchain ETF In Europe

Time to realize Bitcoin as payment 

Though the issue has been resolved, this caused a chaos across Europe as multiple banks faced problems and about millions of transactions failed.

However, in complete contrast, public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum can have 100% uptime. In cases of a high fee, a network congestion can occur, but complete outage hasn’t been the case ever.

Unlike payment systems like Visa, these blockchain networks are decentralized that means a central point can’t bring it down.

Public and private blockchains both have been gaining a lot of attention and interest from people and different industries. Now, with this Visa crash, it has become apparent that decentralization is, in fact, a better and preferable choice.

It is time that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies go mainstream and blockchain adoption becomes the main priority.

Do you think as people suffer from the Visa crash, Bitcoin as payment adoption will happen at a much rapid pace? Share your thoughts with us!