WASHINGTON — A technical problem affecting the Visa network barred some people around the United States from using their credit and debit cards for about 45 minutes on Sunday, the company said.
The outage was caused by a recent update Visa has made to its system, said Visa Inc. spokeswoman Sandra Chu. She said Visa had trouble processing some transactions as a result, but the system is operating normally now.
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Chu said the problem Sunday was unrelated to the security breach potentially affecting Visa and MasterCard customers that was reported Friday by credit card processor Global Payments Inc.
The outage occurred from around 2:40 p.m. to 3:20 p.m. EDT, a person from a major bank said. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because bank employees were not authorized to speak publicly. Visa had notified the banks that are members of its network of the problem.
Consumers and merchants reported having Visa cards rejected on Sunday.
At the Shoot Smart gun range in Fort Worth, Texas, manager Jared Sloane said credit and debit transactions stopped working early in the afternoon.
Sloane said a few customers walked out when told they could only pay with cash or check, but otherwise the problem wasn’t yet much of a disruption.
Shoot Smart said problems with transactions were persisting at about 6:40 EDT.
Chu said Visa’s system was fully up and operational.
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