The Visa and Mastercard payment system has crashed.

Transactions across Britain will not complete amid problems with the biggest card payment system. The issue means that people in shops – either online or real stores – are unable to actually pay for their goods.

Customers received messages telling them there is a “disruption of service” that will mean all payment providers are unable to receive or send money.

A range of different banks and other financial institutions use Visa and Mastercard’s payment system, meaning that even transactions using non-Visa branded cards could be affected by the problem.

A statement from Visa suggested that it didn’t yet know the cause of the outage.

“Visa is currently experiencing a service disruption,” it read.

“This incident 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.”

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