Visa services have now reportedly returned back to normal after a hardware failure resulted in customers all over Europe unable to make payments using their cards for several hours yesterday.
In a statement released by the financial services company, Visa apologized and said that the outage was not down to "unauthorised access or a cyber attack". However, many customers revealed that money had disappeared from their accounts.
But is Europe ready to become completely cashless? In a hypothetical situation, if MasterCard services also suffered an outage and there was no cash available anymore, we would struggle to make payments, if cryptocurrencies were also not an option.
Even though the UK has had the credit card since the 1950s, mobile payments have been the real catalyst when it comes to cash being less and less used, especially in other countries like America, where swiping is as everyday as the European experience of entering a PIN, or now, tapping your contactless card.