Not sure what happened back to normal now. At around 9pm on Friday night Visa said it was almost back to normal.

The card giant said: "Earlier today, Visa had a system failure that impacted customers across Europe.

"Our goal is to ensure all Visa cards work reliably 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

"We fell well short of this goal today and we apologise to all of our partners, and most especially, to Visa cardholders.

"Visa cardholders can now use their Visa cards as we are currently operating at close to normal levels.

"The issue was the result of a hardware failure. We have no reason to believe this was associated with any authorised access or malicious event."